A Dream Whose Sleep
by Cartographical
Summary: The last time Castle regained consciousness, he was just grateful to be alive. Now, that other world dances technicolor at the edges of his dark reality.
1. Chapter 1

_For chezchuckles, who continuously and unflinchingly coaxes/bludgeons/coerces/traumatizes me into writing and who indulges an insane number of my capslocked requests. _

_Also, all the thanks in the world to Sandiane Carter and Muppet47 for their terrifyingly persistent encouragement._

* * *

Someone is screaming.

It's shrill and panicked. For the space of several breaths, he is aware of only that noise.

More starts to filter in. Voices thread through the underlying quiet – _medic, they need a medic_, and _someone call 911_, and _holy fuck, was that a cop car? _The sound of settling air, a quiet groan, a soft, sinking hiss.

The metallic taste of blood.

The sharp scent of burning, rubber or metal or -

The rough contour of the asphalt underneath pads of his fingers. An ache just below the point of his hipbone. A distant, far-away throb behind his eyes.

There is nothing to see.

He opens his mouth, works his throat, casts about for a voice he can't quite get to.

A large hand, unsteady on his shoulder. It orients him, stops the world from lurching quite so violently.

"An ambulance is on its way," a voice says, male, young, breathy with anxiety and exhilaration. "That was wild, man. Can't believe you're alive."

It's enough to drag a word out of him. "Beckett," he breathes, his throat stinging, his head pounding with the name.

"Just relax," the voice says. "Fuck, the way you flew through the air. Wish I got a vid -"

"Beckett," he tries again, lurching up against the pressure of the hand, but his arms shake and his quads won't drag his knees under him and the world is locked in a black and endless spin.

"Dude, you gotta stay down," the voice says. "I don't know how fucked up you got, but I'm telling you, when that thing went off…"

Castle tries to cobble words into a description, something about the tall and gorgeous detective who was at the other side of the car when – When. But the words slip away, sinking into darkness. If only he could find some focus, gather the spinning threads of his consciousness. If only he could _see_.

"And you really don't look so good," the voice is saying, rolling on in a torrent of rapid phrases he can't quite catch. Castle clings to the sound, to the breathless excitement and concern, tries to let the cadence of the stream of words and the feeling of the hand clenched on his shoulder anchor him.

"Kate," he urges. He tries to gather himself again, struggles against the tremble of his muscles, falls back against the cold pavement before he's gained an inch. The air sighs out of his chest in a soft and helpless groan.

"Ambulance should be getting here soon, and fuck, fuck, I'm sorry dude, but do you know how many views a video like that would have gotten on a Youtube…"

Castle tunes back out, sifts through the morning, fights to find the memory of her in the formless blank. She's there, right there, the images scraping against the edges of the void:

Her sun-soaked smile as she woke him, the early-morning light drenching the room in a golden haze. The soft lines of her biceps, tensing as she rolled beneath his body, her sudden stillness as his lips drifted along the line of her jaw.

And then – a call? On the Cullen case? Whatever's next is fractured, jagged and half formed. At the twelfth, the brush of her fingers against his as he handed her a coffee. The sharp and sudden bark of Gates' voice. The acrid smell of old weed seeping under the door of a dingy apartment complex.

The snap of the still-cold spring air as they walked toward her car, a sharp contrast to the warmth that trickled through his chest as she smiled at him over the hood.

And then –

"I need to find my partner," he rasps.

The unsteady rhythm of words pauses, breaks, reforms. "I don't know, man. I was over at the intersection when it blew –"

"Blew," Castle echoes.

"Yeah. That was – fuck, man, that was a serious bomb. You're a cop, right? You must have totally pissed someone off to have gotten that big a reaction, I mean, not that…"

A bomb.

Castle lurches up into the darkness, bunching his legs and propelling off the pavement.

The sudden dizziness sucks him back down. The sounds, the omnipresent string of words and the voices in the distance and what might be the far-away wail of sirens, fade into a soft rush of white noise.

He closes his eyes and wakes to a wash of light.

* * *

He jerks, feels the frenetic pound of his pulse through his body, the stutter of terror in his lungs.

For a heartbeat, his panic melts into relief at the spill of light through the windows, the boneless heat of a warm body curled onto his chest, the sharp and clear awareness of reality that makes this more than just a dream.

But the light is dappled, filtered through the just-unfurling leaves of the huge oaks right outside the windows. The room is large and beige and carpeted and no place he has ever seen before. And the woman, the soft and bare spread of skin breathing quietly against him –

He jerks up and away, shoving himself back against the headboard. The woman tumbles off his chest, lands with her back facing him as she lets out a low hum of reproach.

"It's too early," she husks.

He knows that voice. "Meredith," he breathes, fisting his hands to stop the tremor he feels running through them.

She flips over, her gaze tripping languidly over his bare chest before resting on his face. "Nightmare?" she murmurs, curling closer to him.

"Something like." What else can he say? This – why is he waking up in a world drenched with sun and reality next to _Meredith?_

"Want me to kiss it better?" she purrs, sliding closer, but he jolts back, pushing himself out of the bed and standing tense and awkward in his boxers.

"I'm up now," he says.

If she notes the breathlessness of his voice, she must chalk it up to his dream. "Don't worry. I get it," she slurs, already drifting back to sleep.

He stumbles over to a gigantic walk-in closet, blinks at the odd emptiness of it. A pair of jeans are folded on a shelf, and he jerks them over his hips, walks out of the room and into a wide hallway that leads, eventually, to a spiraling set of stairs. The carpet under his bare feet has a plush luxuriousness to it that's entirely wrong. He feels a flash of yearning for the cool firmness of the hardwood of his loft, of Beckett's apartment.

He's lucky – the first door he throws open, the one adjacent to the bedroom, houses a huge mahogany desk and a sleek laptop. He sinks gratefully to the chair in front of it, stabs a shaking finger at the power button, feels air force itself through his throat in an unsteady inhale as the machine whirs to life.

His name pops as a login, and his fingers trip over his password without conscious thought. The computer gives a soft, reproachful noise, staying insistently locked.

Right.

He glances out the window at the sunlight and the trees, looks down to see an expanse of greening grass leading up to a spread of stonework, then a clear blue pool.

He woke up in a bed with Meredith.

He tries another password, then another, all combinations of the twelfth and Beckett's badge number and the odder cases they've worked, before the thought stops him, freezes him cold. If Meredith is in his bed. If they haven't -

No. He cuts himself off, reaching back in his consciousness to a time before Beckett, tapping out combinations of Alexis' birthday and name and favorite ice cream place before he realizes he doesn't know if that's real, either.

He gulps, blinks, sees the icon at the bottom of the screen that will let him log in as a guest.

The machine kicks up a neutral background, and he's pulling up a browser and typing Alexis' name into Google before he can let himself think. He huffs a relieved sigh as he scans the page, different than the results her name usually pulls, but unmistakably her - an NHS scholarship list, summa cum laude at Greenwich Academy, a list of their students studying at Oxford.

He's barely scanned it, just enough to confirm her existence, before he's typing again in the search box, fingers fumbling over Kate Beckett's name.

Usually when he Googles her, he comes up first. A blog entry on Richard Castle's muse. A fan page for Detective Nikki Heat. A news article about the murder-mystery ride-along at the NYPD. Somewhere in the middle of the first page, other articles begin appearing, emerging with increasing frequency: Detective Shot in Chest at Captain's Funeral. Hostage Standoff at the 12th Precinct. Bomb Guts Tribeca Apartment.

Usually.

Here, the first entry reads: Suspect in Cold Case Brought to Justice. Then a scattering of pages on commendations, awards, arrests. He breathes through it, won't let himself think about the search results or the carpet underneath his feet or the woman currently curled in his bed, just quickly tabs over to the news and searches for car bombs in Manhattan.

Nothing.

Okay.

He snatches up the landline, fumbles over the number to the 12th, gets an out of service message that stops his heart before he remembers to punch in the area code.

The operator asks him if he has an emergency, and he almost blurts a stupid _yes _that would get him funneled straight to 911. "Detective Kate Beckett," he finally hoarses out.

"One moment please," the woman says, her voice smooth and slow and calm.

The wait is interminable.

Finally, the line clicks back on. "She's unable to take a call right now, but I can put you through to Detective Esposito, or she should return within an hour."

His throat tightens, stifles his whispered "I'll call back" as he hangs up the phone. For the first time since he woke up to the sound of screaming, he sucks in a full breath of air, an odd kind of relief trickling slowly through his chest. He doesn't understand any of what's going on, but Beckett is here and unharmed, and that's enough.

The landline rings just as he's placing the phone back in the cradle. It's a Manhattan area code, a number he doesn't recognize, but his heart immediately starts thumping with irrational hope. "Hello?" he asks, tentative, his voice a little strangled.

"Oh, Richard, darling, you sound positively awful."

"Mother," he murmurs, can't think of anything else to say.

"I'm off to the Hamptons with Roger, but I wanted to check in on you before I left."

"Oh," he says.

She sighs. "Richard, are you sure you won't let me come up there? I can get from my door to Greenwich in under an hour."

Greenwich. Connecticut?

He squeezes his eyes closed, sucks in a breath, nearly jerks off the chair at a cold wet press into his palm. He stares down into the large and eager eyes of a Golden Retriever, greying around the muzzle. The animal whines low in its throat, and Castle drops his hand, scratches behind its ears.

His mother's still the same – she fills the space left by his silence.

"I was talking to Alexis just yesterday, right before she left for the Pyrenees, and, Richard, I know she wouldn't want me to say it in so many words, but she's _worried_ about you. And with her being out of touch, darling – we just both want to make sure you're okay."

"The Pyrenees?" he murmurs, carding his fingers through the silky hair on the dog's shoulders. It drops down at his feet, staring up at him with an earnest kind of loyalty.

"Her spring break camping trip. She's only been talking about it for the last three months." He hears her intake of air, a staccato silence in the flow of her words that indicates a genuine concern underpinning her breezy affect. "Why don't you come with us to the Hamptons, darling?"

"No. No, I'm okay," he says. He wonders, idly, what part of his life is crashing down, here in this place that seems too brightly vivid to be less than reality.

Alexis is safe, presumably, in the Pyrenees. Beckett is safe in Manhattan. He's on the phone with his mother. Everything else - everything else will be fine.

He flips through several questions, decides he can't ask any of them without ratcheting up her concern to an even higher level. "I'll talk to you later. Have fun in the Hamptons."

"You'll call me if you need me."

"I will," he says, hanging up and letting the phone drop to the desk.

He closes his eyes. Smells the smoke and hears the screams and sees the vast and endless darkness. Opens his eyes. Stands. Stares out the window at the trees and the grass and the pool. Tries not to wonder what's happening. Tries not to wonder if he's dead.

If she's dead.

He hears carpeted footballs at his back, thinks it's possible that he's never been so grateful for Meredith interrupting his thoughts.

When he turns, she's perfectly coiffed, dragging a large suitcase behind her.

"This is the last of it," she says. "I'll wait for the taxi outside." He knows her just well enough to see that she's trying too hard to be nonchalant.

He's not sure what to say.

She sighs, steps into him, wraps her fingers around the back of his neck and brushes her lips lightly over his. "Happy official divorce day, Kitten," she says, untangling herself from him and walking out of the office.

* * *

An hour later he's slumped in a seat on a New York-bound Amtrak.

The exhaustion rolls in suddenly, washes over him in a drowning, paralyzing wave. He sinks into the darkness and swims up toward the quiet murmur of Beckett's voice.


	2. Chapter 2

The darkness is endless, inescapable, suffocating.

It doesn't matter.

The low voice lilting through the room, the sure fingers carding through his hair, he doesn't care if he never sees again, he doesn't care, he doesn't care.

"Beckett," he rasps, the word tattered and threadbare. He pushes himself up onto his elbows.

Her hand stutters in its rhythm, then trails down his cheek, strokes gently along his neck, flutters over his shoulder. He tilts toward her touch, feels a grateful, knotted lump at the back of his throat. Fuck, he'd thought she was dead.

"Hey, Castle," she murmurs, a broken edge to her voice. "How're you feeling?"

He mentally flips down his body, flexing fingers, toes, quads, abs, purposefully ignoring the dull throb behind his eyes, the disconcerting, dizzying darkness. "Could be worse. Wouldn't mind seeing your face."

She laughs, a breathless, grateful sound. The feeling beneath it echoes in his bones.

"You okay?"

"I'm fine," she murmurs, her fingers drifting up, scratching again along his scalp.

He hums skeptically, wishing more than ever that he could see her. They're better with their eyes than with words; her face has always told him her secrets when her voice has refused.

"Alexis and Martha'll get here soon," she offers in a quiet murmur.

"I wasn't out too long, then?"

He hears the equivocation in her beat of silence. "Long enough. But there was a lot of confusion, between the bomb and the hospital transport."

"You didn't call them?" he asks, trying not to growl it out in accusation. She didn't answer him after the explosion. She didn't call his family. There's something she's not telling him.

"I –" she starts, her voice low and placating, but then the door creaks open and purposeful footfalls sound into the room.

"Dr. Woodlawn," Beckett murmurs.

"How are you feeling, Kate?" he asks.

Castle can't help but bristle, and not only because he has some lingering trauma about Beckett and doctors, especially doctors who bustle into the room calling her _Kate._ But if the man is asking her how she's feeling_ –_

"Anxious to hear a little more about Castle," she says, her hand smoothing down his arm until her palm cups his, her fingers squeezing his knuckles tightly.

He wants to focus, he really does, but the darkness sharpens every other sensation so intensely that he has room to concentrate only on the clear and bright pressure of her fingers, on the steady sound of her inhales and exhales. The doctor's voice is droning on, something about optic nerve damage and blunt head trauma and surgical decompression of the optic canal.

Beckett's voice cuts in. "You'd said before that the most recent studies indicated that surgical options only lead to improvement in forty-three percent of patients."

The doctor pauses, sighs, and Castle can almost hear the man shaking his head. "But when the visual acuity is zero…"

Castle fills in the blanks. "Time for me to get a seeing eye dog, then?"

Beckett's fingernails cut into his palm. Okay. It might be too soon. "What about the prednisolone cocktail we talked about earlier?" she asks, rasping, exhausted.

And then she and the doctor are volleying back and forth and Castle is somehow only just realizing that he must be on some amazing drugs, because tracking it all is making his head spin, and he doesn't even mind that he's sliding back down, down, the comfort of Beckett's hand in his lulling him into a brightly swaying reality.

* * *

He nearly flounders out of his seat.

"New York's in five," the Conductor tells him gently.

"Thanks," he murmurs, disoriented by the constant chatter of the people in the car, the sway of the train underneath him, by the light, the bright and streaming and constant light.

He blinks, fumbles for any sense of familiarity, pulls his doppelganger's phone out of his pocket, taps out her number again just to see it on the screen.

Before, he hadn't called her directly because his chest had been tight with a nameless terror. Before, there'd been a bomb in their car and he'd called out to her and she hadn't answered.

Now, he feels like an idiot, speeding towards Manhattan to find a woman who probably doesn't know him from anyone (feels like even more of an idiot for indulging himself in this sun-washed, vivid fantasy, for letting the vibrancy of it pull him in until he forgets to remind himself that it can't possibly be real). But he can't find an acceptable alternative. Not sitting alone by the pool in that gigantic house with only a damn dog for company. Not flying to the Pyrenees to hunt down Alexis. Definitely not joining his mother in the Hamptons.

He'll just stop by the precinct. Not because he needs a touchstone in this overly-bright world. Not because he feels ready to break. Just - just to see her.

* * *

He steps out of the elevator and into the fluorescent lighting and the quiet murmur of the twelfth. The sudden sense of belonging clenches tightly at his throat, makes his steps falter even though he walked through this same space just this morning. He sighs out a long exhale, the relief thrumming steady through his body before his eyes fix on her desk.

She's not there.

He sucks in a breath, makes sure his pace is slow and measured as he walks through the bullpen. Ryan and Esposito both glance over at him but then continue with their work, and he's about to try for some kind of awkward introduction when she walks out of the break room.

Her hair is short, dark and spiking out above her shoulders. That's all he can bring himself to notice about her for a moment, the utter incongruity of it, but then his gaze drifts to the elegant line of her cheekbone, the sharp curve of her jaw, the delicate clench of her fingers around the handle of a chunky ceramic coffee mug, and as she comes to a halt in front of him it's all he can do not to drag her into his arms.

"God, it's good to see your face," he whispers, only half aware he's even saying anything, still using every ounce of his energy to resist the urge to wrap his body around hers.

He'd thought she was dead, he'd thought she was dead and the hollow spaces left by that cold and horrible certainty will never leave him. The feel of her fingers sliding over his scalp had been enough, he'd thought, but now he's drowning in the grateful wave that's rushed over him at the sight of her.

She looks at him like he's lost his mind.

"Mr. Castle," she says, not a question at all. He blinks slowly, tries to ground himself in this reality, tries to puzzle it out. She's not giving him much to work with, just a vague familiarity with his name and face. Maybe from a dust jacket, or some encounter in this world that didn't splinter down the path of four years of helpless yearning culminating in a perfect and cliché dark and stormy night.

"Detective," he murmurs, though his pulse is thumping _Kate Kate Kate._

The squeezing relief he'd felt at being inside the twelfth is slowly starting to melt away, reforming into a curl of unease. Ryan and Esposito won't stop eying him skeptically. His chair is conspicuously absent. The murder board – the timeline is still there, stark, bold lines against the white backdrop, but it's missing something. It's missing the story. And even now her eyes are drifting over to it, skipping to his face and then away like he's an annoyance, an imposition, hopelessly in her way.

The way she watched him had changed so gradually that he'd never quite realized the extent. How she'd gone from staring at him like there was nothing more horrifying in the world to regarding him like someone worth hearing, and eventually, so slowly, to watching him like she was in love.

It's a confusing mix of heartbreaking and arousing, the way she's glaring at him, the way she pins him with a cold stare that he now knows means she'd like to shove him violently down and then straddle him.

"I was hoping to buy you a coffee," he blurts, needing to get her away, needing to bring her to a place where her eyes won't constantly drift back to her timeline. Never mind that they haven't gotten further than three words between them.

"Excuse me?" Surely – did his Beckett ever look _quite _so incredulous?

"Can I buy you a coffee?" he asks again, tries to inject his voice with a friendly kind of determination that in no way betrays now badly he wants to reach out and touch her – her cheek, forearm, clavicle – anywhere.

"Why." Her affect is utterly flat. He's somehow forgotten, over the past couple years, how genuinely terrifying she has the potential to be in day-to-day conversations.

"Re – research?" he tries, his tongue tripping over itself. He realizes he doesn't even know if he's a writer here. She knows his name, though. That has to mean something.

She blinks with something that could almost be pity, but the hint of feeling in her eyes is gone before he's ever even certain it's really there. "I already have a coffee," she says, and then, probably to stave off any more advances, "and I'm working."

Esposito leans over, smiling evilly from his desk. "Don't worry about it, Beckett. We're waiting on the lab results anyway. It'll be at least a couple hours."

"I want to look back through those phone records –"

"Already on it," Ryan chirrups helpfully. "And you know ever since that coffee machine went on the fritz again last week that you don't actually want to drink that stuff." He jerks his chin at the ceramic mug.

"There's nothing wrong with the coffee here," she reproaches.

_Oh, Beckett_, Castle almost says._ You don't know how good it can be._

He can sense her tilting back at the murder board, her imminent refusal a near-palpable thing, and, for the first time since almost a year ago, when he stood in her apartment and begged her to let go of her futile quest, he has no idea how to get her to change her mind. "Fifteen minutes," he bargains. "Please."

She huffs a sigh, turns to glare at her boys, both of whom immediately shoot back excessively cheesy thumbs up. "Take as long as you need!" Esposito says, waving them toward the elevator.

Beckett stalks away. Castle squares his shoulders, takes a breath, and follows.


	3. Chapter 3

He catches himself just before blurts her regular latte order.

She'd been dead silent in the elevator, huddled in a corner and glaring at him like he'd carried some sort of virulent plague, and on the walk over to the cafe he'd been too busy half running to keep up with her to carry on any kind of conversation.

He waits until they've sat at a booth in the corner, opens his mouth, and then sits dumbly as all his words turn to ash. He's not sure what his exact plan had been, though somewhere in the back of his mind he'd had some vague and unformed vision of laying out the whole story for her, of puzzling through the mystery together. But he'd been picturing the Beckett whose face folds into a smile whenever she sees him, the Beckett who lets him cajole her into eating late-night Italian in the middle of a case and who traces through every thread of every crazy theory he spins. Now, as he picks up his mug to cover his awkward pause and she continues to glare at him, the idea seems utterly laughable.

"What," she snaps, and he realizes that he's been looking vacantly at a point just over her shoulder.

"I…" he starts, trails off, lets himself stare down at his coffee briefly before dragging his gaze back up to her face.

Now that he's really looking, it's so much more obvious than just her hair. Her lips don't seem so ready to quirk into a smile. The shadows under eyes are smudged, deep, visible even through the makeup she's carefully applied. The hand that's not wrapped around the coffee mug is drumming out a soft but tense rhythm on the Formica table.

Something is wrong. Something far more than simply her annoyance at his dragging her away from the precinct.

When he glances at her eyes, she's staring him coldly down. She looks like she's about fifteen seconds from leaving her coffee on the table and stalking back to the 12th, seems like she's about to realize what a ridiculous idea this whole jaunt has been.

"I was hoping to shadow you," he says, wincing as the words tumble from his mouth, so much less than everything he wants to say. He's not sure of anything, anything except that he can't stomach the idea of walking away from her. He's not even sure he's a writer, here, which would make his request seem excessively creepy, and how the hell did he not think to Google _himself_ as he was sitting in front of the computer or falling asleep on the train? "For a book," he adds informatively, his words crashing up against the blankness of her stare.

He wishes he knew how she knew his name.

"Just –" he appeals, thoroughly giving up on everything he knows about negotiation as he bargains against himself, "just for a couple cases."

"No," she says, too resolute, her absolute seriousness etched into the steel of her eyes.

His heart thrums stupidly, unsteadily against his ribs. The house in Greenwich could mean no contact with the mayor, no opportunities to manipulate New York City connections, nothing to work with except the distant chance that she'll take some kind of pity on him. He glances down, runs his thumb along the ridge of his mug, thinks about a way he can lay the whole unbelievable situation out for her that won't lead to her walking away or slapping him. "I'd really owe you one," he says, his voice far more raspy, far less jovial than he'd intended. Fuck, he's going to scare her away before she'll even think about it.

He chances a glance up at her just in time to see her glare soften, melting into something that's nearly a severe approximation of his Beckett. "Look. Castle. I know you're going through a rough time right now..." she starts, trailing off but keeping her gaze fixed on his face.

He blinks, tilts his head, considers, his blood still pulsing hard though his veins. "Do you?" he finally hedges. And there it is, the slightest blush tingeing her cheeks, the skid of her teeth over her lip, a tiny hitch of her gaze away from him. It clicks into place, her pitying look earlier, her eventual agreement to get coffee with him, the way she's watching him now. A wave of relief washes over him at the prospect of an angle he can work. "Been perusing the internet for the latest news on my scandal of a divorce?"

It'd been a risk, but the sharp huff of air she exhales lets him know he's right. "Hardly need to peruse," she mutters.

He quirks half a smile at her, a little too quick, a little too awkward. He doesn't quite have his balance here yet, a train ride away from an empty house with a Golden Retriever and a just-departed ex-wife.

"Sorry," she says, her voice a little softer, laced with a thread of the soothing tone she uses when she informs a victim's next of kin.

"I know how you can make it up to me," he says.

She shoves some hair behind her ear, takes one last swig of coffee. "We've talked about this before," she says, pushing back from the table and yanking on her coat before stalking out onto the sidewalk.

Well, shit.

He catches up to her just outside, the sharp spring wind making his cheeks ache almost immediately. He lunges, grabs her sleeve, and she spins around so quickly he thinks she might hit him.

"Don't maim me." He holds his hands up, faces his palms toward her, smiles beseechingly.

"I'm not rehashing this," she hisses.

"You sure?" he asks. "I could really go for a rehash right about now."

He thinks, from the particular quality of the furrow just above her eyes, that there really is the potential he won't be able to escape injury. Her gaze flicks down to his hand, and he realizes he's still desperately clutching the sleeve of her coat, hard enough that his fingers are starting to ache. She yanks her arm violently away and starts walking with rapid steps towards the precinct.

He hustles to catch up, falls into step beside her, tries to formulate any kind of plan. He has two blocks to convince her. He wastes a block and a half walking quietly next to her, assessing the particular clench of her jaw, but apparently waiting silently works better on a scale measured in years rather than city blocks.

"Sorry," he finally murmurs, his hands thrust in his pockets and curled in fists to keep himself from reaching out for her again.

Her unceasingly forward momentum never stops, but she tilts her chin toward him slightly, a flicker of interest flaring briefly in her eyes before dying down.

"I'm sorry," he says, more firmly this time. If there's one thing he's come to realize by now, it's that Kate Beckett is a woman who values sincerity in an apology. "I shouldn't have gone to the precinct unannounced. I shouldn't have asked you to leave for coffee when you were in the middle of the case. I shouldn't have dragged up old..." He lets it trail off, unable to complete the thought. _Wounds,_ maybe, except that he has wounded Beckett before, God help him he has, and this version of her does not seem exactly _wounded_ by him. He's sorry for whatever else he's done. Or hasn't done. Sorry that the turns this world has taken haven't led to his waking up in her bed to the soft slide of her hands over his thighs, the low lilt of her voice whispering against his ear, the quiet passion of her smile against his lips.

Suddenly, they're drawing to a halt outside the precinct, and for one horrible second he's afraid she'll just keep walking. If she does and he follows, if he pushes after her through that first street-level door, he's fairly certain that will be one step too far. Or, well, several more steps than one, but this last would make her shut down entirely.

She turns to him, though, her eyes again shimmering with that same sheen of understanding that would be pity coming from anyone else (twenty years, he'd have been married for over twenty years, and he's not above leveraging her knowledge of his tumultuous personal life to get even an extra minute with her).

"A day," she sighs. "I'll talk to my CO and see if you can't come to the precinct for a day."

His can't stop the relief from stumbling through his chest and bursting out of him in a jagged exhale, can't prevent the hopeful spark that he know flares brightly in his eyes.

"It would be mostly watching us file paperwork and work through leads in the precinct. Maybe questioning a few witnesses."

"Tomorrow?" he breathes.

She blinks, leaning back a fraction, and damnit, it's almost too much. His throat starts to tighten at all the steps back she's taken since he stood at her desk in the precinct and she walked toward him with one mug full of awful coffee.

And so he decides to push a little more. "I'm just feeling a little stuck right now." It sounds pathetic even to him, possibly a little too close to the truth. "It would really help."

She bites her lip. "Give me your number. I'll see what I can do."

"Thank you," he breathes, and even the look she gives him, like he might be some kind of too-ardent stalker, does nothing to dampen the relief that pulses brightly through his blood.

"I'm not promising anything," she says as she nudges her phone into his hands.

"I know. I'll just be here, sitting desperately outside the precinct at first light," he responds, entering his number into her contacts.

"A stalking charge would be a great way to start damage control," she huffs.

"Speaking of public images, you have any dirty pictures on –"

"We're done here," she snaps, reaching out to snatch the phone away. Her cold fingers brush gracelessly over his, and he _knows_ he doesn't imagine the slight stutter in her movement, the quiet hitch of her breath, the way her whole body pauses for a heartbeat, her pinky curled against his index finger, before she jerks away, the phone clutched too tightly in her grip.

"See you," he says, trying a little too hard for jovial as she spins towards the door.

"I'll call," she tosses back, not even bothering to turn around, but the slow burn of hope that started with her touch doesn't dissipate, not even when she disappears into the precinct.

He keeps that with him on the 1 train, keeps it with him as he curls up in an uncomfortable seat in a dark corner of Penn Station, keeps it with him as he once again lets the swaying rhythm of the Amtrak lull him back into a dark and heavy sleep.

* * *

He wakes slowly to the soft murmur of his mother's and daughter's voices.

The last time consciousness returned in his hospital bed, he was so damn grateful he was alive that he had no room for anything else. Now, that other world dances technicolor at the edges of his dark reality.

It's a dream. It can only be a too-vivid dream brought about by a concussion, by whatever cocktail of drugs they've put him on. How else would be have woken up in Greenwich with Meredith? Why else, when he's there, would he be trying to make inroads with a bristling version of Beckett instead of worrying about fighting his way back to the reality in which he already has her?

It's a dream.

A dream that even now is throbbing painfully through his blood, a dream that even now makes his every synapse fire in awareness. But just a dream.

"Dad?" He hears the quiet question over the soft pad of footfalls toward his bed.

"Hey, pumpkin," he murmurs, lifting his hand and wiggling his fingers in a sluggish wave.

"I was so worried," she says, and then he feels her hands at his biceps and her torso leaning toward him in an awkward hug. "Are you feeling okay? Do you want a nurse?"

"No. No, I'm okay," he says. Okay enough. His head is throbbing dully. His ribs ache when he breathes too deeply. And the darkness, the all-surrounding darkness –

But he's here. Beckett's here. Speaking of –

"Where's Beckett?" he asks, unable to help it.

There's a pause that's a fraction too long before Martha fills it with her overly-breezy lilt. "She had to step out for a bit – you were sleeping for quite a while, darling." He hears her walk to the side of the bed opposite Alexis, feels her fingers, slim and strong and shaking slightly, lace through his own.

"But – she's okay, right?" He hears the break in his voice, hears how _pathetic_ he sounds, but he can't do anything about it.

"She's fine," his mother says brusquely. "What we need to focus on right now is getting you better."

"Easier to focus on that if people would tell me what the hell was going on," he gruffs, trying not to snap it.

"You almost _died_," Alexis hisses, grabbing the hand that Martha's not holding, her fingers tightening uncomfortably. "You almost died and they've flown in three different specialists and none of them are even able to answer the relatively simple question of whether you'll ever be able to _see _again."

"Flown –" he starts, stops, has to clear his throat. "Flown in three different specialists?"

"And they already have so many different ideas –" Martha starts, but he can't wait for her to finish.

"How long have I been out?"

"Half a day," Alexis murmurs after a beat, sounding a little less angry, a little more miserable. "Five hours since we got here, and you haven't been conscious."

"And the bomb? Or - any leads on the Cullen case? Or if they're connected?"

"Darling, you know we wouldn't know about that," his mother says quietly.

"Yeah," he says, feeling his consciousness gradually start to unthread, the too-harsh knots of darkness unraveling into quiet shadow, a soft and muffled hum of drowsy oblivion.

"You should sleep, Dad," Alexis murmurs.

"Is Beckett…" he starts, but he can't do anything except let it trail off into the listless silence.

"She'll be here soon," Martha says, her fingers firm and reassuring in their grip, and that's all it takes to send him spiraling once more towards a bright reality.


	4. Chapter 4

It's too bright. The hand on his shoulder is too firm, the commanding voice too loud.

"—Greenwich, sir, and you need to get off the train now."

"Sorry, right, sorry," Castle murmurs, still clinging to that world of darkness, to all the questions throbbing through his brain.

The sky's a pale gold from the slowly-setting sun. He walks out into the brisk chill and tries not to think about it, tries not to wallow in the reality of straddling two worlds in which Beckett is so distant.

He focuses instead on the snap of the spring air, the soft calls of the birds over the chatter of suited commuters and the hum of the trains, the flat and fading glow of the sun. Focuses on finding the dark, low-profile BMW in the lot, sleek and sedate and so different from anything he's owned in the past decade. Navigates his way back to the grandiose suburban house, threading through tree-lined streets and turning along sweeping back roads. Concentrates on anything other than his wildly fragmented reality, the refusal of his worlds to coalesce into coherence.

He gets lost twice down seemingly identical streets, and he has to fumble through unfamiliar keys before he can finally open the door, but finally he's stumbling into the foyer –

- and abruptly falling over as a damn dog knocks him off his feet.

"Really?" he asks the animal as it bullies its way onto his lap. "I didn't bother to train you?"

The Golden Retriever nudges its nose under his chin, looks at him with something that Castle swears is indignation.

"Did I leave you for too long?" He pauses, considers, scratching the dog absentmindedly behind its ear. "Maybe I'm usually home with you? You're not really giving me much to work with here." The animal nudges even closer before a soft tongue drags across Castle's jawbone. He fumbles at the dog's collar, trying to find a tag. "If you're going to lick me like that, I should at least know your name."

He cranes his neck to look at the sedate silver pendant, can't stifle his sigh of dismay.

"Your name is Gus?" Alert eyes lock onto him at the sound of the dull monosyllable. Castle pushes himself to his feet, bumping the dog off his lap and shaking his head in quiet disgust. "Great. Come on, _Gus_. I suppose you have to go outside or something."

He finds a Frisbee by the back door off the living room, walks from the stones of the pool's deck to the carefully-clipped lawn in the deepening cobalt of twilight. The dog leaps beside his legs, and when he throws, the animal bounds off and makes what he has to admit is a fairly impressive leap to catch the Frisbee. It trots back, drops the disc at Castle's feet, and preemptively and exuberantly bounds away.

There's something comforting about the rhythm that he can't help but be drawn into, the flick of his wrist, the leap of the dog, the throw and return, throw and return as the darkness of the night wraps more deeply around them. The air grows colder, and he shivers, thinks he should go inside, get his coat, maybe try to find some food.

But the house is so large and sterile and quiet, and once inside there are so many problems to solve – why he is here, and who he is in this world, and how fate and coincidence and an undoubtedly healthy dose of morphine have tangled together to lead him to this place. He's not content with the mystery. Not exactly. Not at all. But he's not sure he wants the answers to his questions, not sure he wants the overwhelming expanse of this reality and all the nuances he will never begin to know to come crashing down around him.

The dog finally gives up, lies at his feet with the Frisbee in his mouth, and still Castle stands in the nearly-dark night, staring up at the emerging stars, thinking of anything but the world inside the too-big house and the oppressive silence of the phone inside his pocket.

* * *

An hour later he's camped in front of his laptop, a carton of ban mian perched on his desk and twenty-seven tabs open in Chrome.

"Not now, Gus," he says as the dog pushes its head into his lap. "It's time to learn all the sordid secrets of my life." He drags open the first tab, a review of his latest novel, _Stormy Skies. _"I think my naming abilities have deteriorated," he whispers to the dog, who's left its head steadfastly on Castle's leg.

Dana Mulvey of the _New York Review of Books _seems – tepid. "Okay," he murmurs. "Brace yourself, Gus." The dog licks Castle's hand lackadaisically before slumping to the floor in a less-than-enthusiastic show of support. Castle reads aloud in his best stage whisper, the one his mother's temporary love interest had taught him when he was four and stuck backstage in the middle of an excessively long rehearsal. "'_You should have killed me when you had the chance,' Storm says in the middle of Richard Castle's latest novel, at which point the reader can't help but wonder if his creator was in the midst of an unintentional metacognitive break. Though the thirty-two books in the franchise have been steadily successful - _'"

His phone trills and he starts guiltily, suddenly realizing that he's alone in a gigantic house, eating Chinese food out of the carton and reading a book review to a _dog_.

He breathes out in relief when he sees the number on the screen.

"Detective Beckett," he says, can't keep the smile out of his voice.

He hears a pause that's a heartbeat too long. "How'd you know it was me?" she asks, a little clipped, a little wary.

He forces himself to take a deep breath, swallows until he's sure his voice will come out smooth, casual. "Wasn't expecting a lot of other calls from the city at –" he glances at the screen – "ten-thirty at night." Yikes.

"Sorry," she sighs. "Time got away from me."

"You still at work?" he asks, can't help the sharp mix of interest and worry that bleeds into his tone. He pushes back from the computer, walks a meandering path in front of the office windows, turns when he hits the wall, wanders vaguely back in the other direction.

She finally speaks, her voice still distracted, rising and falling in that far-away lilt she gets when her brain is churning in a different gear. "Just chasing lead on something unrelated."

"Anything interesting?" he asks, cursing himself for the awkward pause, the flat beats of silence that he's somehow never had to struggle through with her before.

"Not really," she murmurs.

"Look –" he starts.

"Speaking of –" she says at the same time. "I'm not sure we'll have too many exciting things going on here tomorrow."

"Sounds like the perfect time to get my feet wet," he says, too pathetically eager, but he can't _help _it.

"This isn't getting your feet wet. This is a one-day thing. One day. I spoke to my Captain, and you're cleared for exactly one day, and absolutely nothing outside the precinct."

He can't help but grin – everything might be flipped on its head, but Gates will never change. "Do you realize how many times you just said one day?"

"I felt it necessary to be clear," she says, but underneath the brusqueness he hears the faintest layer of a smile.

He doesn't only want one day, but he'll sure as hell take that over nothing. "What time do you get in?"

"I'm usually around by six, but you don't need to be here that early. It's pretty quiet then."

He frowns, glances down at his watch. Less than eight hours from now. And since when has six been her standard? "You're there, I'm there," is all he says. "I need to squeeze all the pulp out of this one day."

She huffs into the phone. "For a bestselling novelist, your metaphors could really use some work."

"See, Beckett, you're already saving me from a world of clichés." He bites his tongue hard enough that pain starbursts through his mouth, but when she talks she doesn't sound like he's just crossed a line.

"That's a lot of pressure for a day, Castle," she says, a note of finality to her voice, before she hangs up abruptly.

"You have no idea," he murmurs into the silent phone.

* * *

He wakes to the feeling of her fingers trailing slowly up the inside of his forearm.

He doesn't even remember falling asleep – just the wash of happiness that rolled through him after Beckett mocked his figurative language, the tight feeling of longing in his chest at the terseness of her tone.

Beckett. Beckett is here.

"You're back," he rasps, still spiraling up into the dark reality.

Her hand stutters on its path up his forearm, then continues so smoothly that he wonders if he imagined it. "Of course I'm back," she murmurs, barely more than a worried whisper.

He props himself up, tries to push into a sitting position, feels a strange kind of vertigo spinning through the blackness and sinks slowly back onto his elbows.

"Be _careful_," Beckett hisses, her fingers leaving him before a low mechanical whirr sounds and the bed rises steadily up into his back. Her hand returns, her palm along his forearm and her pinky swirling a soothing circle over his elbow.

"I'm perfectly careful," he grumbles, swallowing dryly. Her hand departs again, and he comforts himself with the sound of her breath, the near-inaudible shuffle of air in and out of her lungs.

"Water," she hears her murmur, and then a plastic cup is nudging into his knuckles.

He lifts it, takes a small sip that turns into a swallow, reveling in the cool rush of liquid down his throat.

"Not too much." She taps a staccato warning at his shoulder. There's an edge to her tone he's not used to, worry or preoccupation or – something. He wishes he could see her face.

"You okay?" he asks, holding the cup out for her to take and feeling it leave his fingers.

"Fine. Alexis and Martha got kicked out because of visiting hours, but they'll be back soon."

He realizes he has no idea what time it is, no idea how long he's been drifting in and out of consciousness. "You didn't get kicked out," he says as her fingers return, stroking down his neck.

She hesitates a heartbeat too long for him to be anything but suspicious. "Side benefit of being a member of New York's finest," she finally says smoothly.

His fingers lift of their own accord, find their way unerringly to her face, trace down the gentle curve of her nose, skid over her cheek, slide slowly back to the chapped skin of her lips.

"Castle," she breathes against his hand, and if he weren't already trapped in darkness, the feeling of her lips brushing over his pinky would make his eyes slam shut.

"Why are you lying to me?" he whispers, trailing his index finger along the bow of her lower lip.

"I'm not –" she starts, but she cuts herself off as his hand skirts down, over the column of her throat, along her arc of her esophagus.

"You are."

He can feel the vibration of her body, the sharp edge of need sliding over something darker, some impulse he can barely catch in the hitch of her breath as she leans a millimeter away from him.

"What is it?" he murmurs.

He's met only with the work of her throat against the pads of his fingers as she swallows, the sharp edge of her breathing slightly faster now. He travels down to the hollow between her clavicles, feeling the rise and fall of her skin as she inhales, exhales, feeling the fast and faint pound of her heartbeat. He skims her collarbones, continues down until he meets her shirt.

The edge of rough cotton.

A collar that gapes at the top of her sternum.

"Kate," he murmurs, reproachful, feeling the worry clench deep in his stomach, a wash of anxiety that he breathes in as it rolls over him. Still she is silent beneath his touch.

He continues, over the hospital gown, now, travelling down her sternum before he hits an odd bulk just at the edge of her ribcage and she jerks oddly, quietly.

"Broken ribs," he says, understanding it now, the stiff set of her sternum, the careful angle of her neck.

"Yeah," she murmurs on an exhale.

"What else?" Broken ribs don't entirely explain her absence earlier. Don't entirely explain the way she's only been touching him with one hand.

"My arm," she sighs, giving in, moving closer to the bed as his fingers flutter lightly over the cloth that binds her ribs, down to the top of her stomach.

"Broken?" He draws his hand sideways, skirting across her obliques and then fluttering over empty air to her left arm, the one he now realizes she's held away from him.

"Yeah."

His fingers nudge into her knuckles, wind their way up her hand, over the thin bones of her wrist, hit the rough fabric of an ace bandage instead of the plaster of a cast, then the rise of the bandage over a heavy bulk. "Surgery?" he asks.

"Yeah," she breathes again, and he feels the answer claw at his throat, scrabble at the calm he's worked so hard to maintain.

"Kate," he says again, is surprised at the low steadiness of his tone, surprised at the way the panic stays stampeding in his chest instead of barreling out his throat.

"I didn't think it was fair to worry you," she murmurs.

He waits for her to add something, an _I was wrong_, maybe, but he's met only with silence, only with the heavy bulk of the bandage over her arm. "What else?"

She pauses again, again too long, and he feels a low growl unfurling in his chest, lungs, bones.

"I can't _see_," he grits out. "I can't see, and I would appreciate if you wouldn't use the opportunity to render me completely helpless in every way possible."

"I'm okay," she says, and she must see the clench of his jaw, must feel his utter frustration at his helplessness in the tense set of his muscles. "I am." And even that, the insistence on top of the insistence, is too much to be anything but a lie. "We just – the damn car bomb."

"Do we know –" he starts.

"We don't know anything," she says. Now that he knows, he can unbraid her tone so carefully, work over every thread – her worry over him, her pain from her injuries, her frustration with a suddenly dead-ended case that threw them both too close to death.

"If it was random? If it was related to –"

"We don't know anything," she growls, her right hand clenching tight on his elbow.

"It hasn't been that long."

"Over a day," she sighs.

Oh.

She hears too much in his sudden silence. "Gates has guards on both of us, and Ryan and Esposito are running this thing down with the FBI. They won't quit."

But the quiet washes over them and they both know it's not that easy; they both know the way these things can rush on for days and then slow to a trickle and then gradually, so gradually slide away.

"I'm tired," he rasps, drowning in it, suddenly, the suffocating layers of worry, the stifling and omnipresent darkness.

"They have you on a few different meds – they might have just kicked in."

"Yeah," he slurs.

"Sleep," she says, her lips brushing lightly over his forehead. He wants to ask her if she'll stay, wants to ask her about her arm and ribs and safety, wants to ask her to squeeze into the too-small hospital bed with him, but he's drifting back to brightness before he can say another word.

x

* * *

_Huge thanks to Sandiane Carter for - well, I would call it editing, but it was really more wading through a ridiculous mess of words after listening to me whine for far too long. Special thanks also to Muppet47 and especially to chezchuckles, who is really excellent at encouraging me to just give up on silly, unnecessary sleep so that I have more time to write._

_And thank you so much to everyone who's reviewed so far, even if it's just to say "Really. Really. What the hell are you doing." (I don't think anyone has used those EXACT words, but the spirit is certainly there). Y'all make me smile a big dopey smile at the most inopportune moments._


	5. Chapter 5

The alarm is blaring and there's a tongue dragging across his neck and everything is far too bright.

He startles up, jolting directly into the wet nose and concerned eyes of a Golden Retriever. "God, Gus," he breathes, struggling to quell the vibrating sense of panic that lingers in his bones as he wriggles over to the alarm and slams it off.

It's four-thirty in the morning.

He briefly debates trying to go back to sleep, trying to will himself back to the narrow confines of his hospital and the feel of her fingers on his forehead. He needs answers from his Beckett, a thorough rundown of everything that's happened while he's been unconscious, but there's an awareness thrumming through his blood, a sharp acuity that means he's up for good. And there's something about this place, some deep and primal pull that washes away the urgency of the other world (of reality, he tries to remind himself – of _reality_), that drags his consciousness completely into this universe of vivid colors.

He pushes himself out of the bed, scrubbing his hand unsteadily down his face. Every light in the room is shining brightly. His pants and belt and shirt are still on, and his phone is clenched in his fingers. An uncomfortable tingling throbs down his arm from the awkward position into which he collapsed. It's oddly disconcerting, how suddenly he dropped out of this world, but he shoves down the unease that roils deep in his stomach, focuses on gently pushing the dog away and dragging himself into the shower. Choosing a sleek grey suit. Driving the unfamiliar route to the train station. Drowsing through the trip on the Amtrak and then the several stops on the F train. And finally, finally, the familiar coffee order at Uncommon Ground, the three-block walk from there to the precinct.

It's just six when he steps off the elevator, and he notes with an odd sense of pride that Beckett's desk is still unoccupied. He peers around the utterly silent bullpen, sees a chair that seems serviceable enough wedged into the corner. He sets the coffees carefully next to her keyboard, drags the chair over to its customary spot beside her desk, and regards the scene with satisfaction.

He hears the low sound of the elevator opening, the noise making his heart set up a stupid, stumbling rhythm against his sternum.

But it's not Beckett who walks off.

It's Montgomery.

It's Montgomery, his head turning towards Castle and a tired smile quirking his lips as he strides across the empty bullpen.

It's Montgomery, it's Montgomery and they're alone in the bullpen and Castle feels his muscles tighten and tremble with the need to do _something_. Jog forward and fling his arms around the man's back. Ball up his fist and slam it into the Captain's face.

This is the man who gave his life for Beckett, who worked so hard to protect her.

But this is also the man who betrayed her.

"Richard Castle," Montgomery is saying, stopping in front of Castle and sticking his hand out. He looks good – _alive _– but there's a tired downturn to the line of his mouth, an exhaustion to the slump of his shoulders that Castle's never seen before.

Castle tries, but it's a heartbeat too long before he can unclench his fingers and force the stiff and wooden muscles of his arm to stretch forward.

"I'm Roy Montgomery, Captain here at the twelfth. We're all excited to have a writer of your caliber with us for the day."

Castle swallows dryly, feels the thud of his pulse in his throat, tries to dredge up any kind of an appropriate response. "I'm excited to be here, Sir," he gets out, the words rasping out over the sandpaper that suddenly lines his throat.

"You couldn't have chosen a more capable Detective," Montgomery says. "Beckett's the best we have."

Hearing her name from Montgomery's mouth drills a shiver down his spine, and all he can think of is the broken heat of her sobs against his palm, the buckle of her body towards the ground as she heard the final shot ring out in the hangar.

The elevator chimes again. Beckett steps out, and he thanks every deity he can think of, because he has nothing for the Captain, no kind of response that could be anywhere near adequate.

She barely hesitates when she sees them, just a slight hitch in her step that he never would have noticed if he hadn't spent the last four years watching her every movement. "Sir," she says. "And Castle." She doesn't exactly say _I wasn't expecting company so early_, but the statement is evident in the dark and skeptical way she eyes them.

"Detective Beckett," Castle says. Some energy has worked its way back into his tone just from the sight of the curve of her jaw, the lithe lines of her body.

"I was just welcoming Mr. Castle to the 12th," Montgomery says.

"Ah. Yes." Her clipped words leave no doubt as to how happy she is that Castle chose to arrive so early.

Montgomery's eyes flick between the two of them with something like amusement. "I'll be in my office if you need anything," he says, stepping back. "Good luck," he adds as he walks away.

"I think it was me he was wishing luck, Beckett," Castle says as she sinks into her seat. "Those were some scary looks for six in the morning."

"It's six ten," she corrects, dragging a file out of a bottom drawer of the desk.

"Right. Six ten."

He sits, then winces under the incredulity of her stare. Dragging over a chair might have been presumptuous.

"I brought you a coffee." He nudges the cup toward her.

She doesn't smile, but she does pick the cup up and sip hesitantly, and then her eyes close in a long, slow blink of pleasure that has his stomach clenching. "How'd you know my order?" she asks, a hint of rapture at the edge of her tone. It should make him entirely happy, but he's only ever seen her quite this excited about her caffeine when she's utterly exhausted.

"Yesterday," he says quickly. Her one arched eyebrow manages to adeptly imply that she thinks he's walking the fine line of stalking. "I'm a writer. Its my job to notice things."

"Great. You can start noticing the timeline on Elizabeth Cullen." She gestures to the board, but his head is already snapping up, his pulse thudding too hard through his head. It doesn't mean anything. Of course the same murders would fall on Beckett's desk here. His two decades of marriage wouldn't have influenced Elizabeth Cullen's life or death, wouldn't have affected her turning up in a dumpster in the Financial District with bound hands and a slit throat.

The bomb that put them both in the hospital went off over a day ago in his world, and this Beckett is sitting in front of him, looking very much like she hasn't nearly blown up recently. It's fine. She's fine.

"Elizabeth Cullen," he murmurs, still trying to calm his thundering heartbeat. Nothing is lining up the way he'd predicted – he'd somehow never thought the case here would be the same, just as he'd never thought the captain wouldn't be Gates.

"Single thirty-three year old from the Upper East side," Beckett says, not looking up from the file in front of her. "A homeless guy shifting through dumpsters found her body three days ago."

He waits, but she doesn't give him anything else. He huffs a frustrated breath of air as the realization washes over him - of course she doesn't. She's not looking to build theory with him.

He's not her partner.

He glances over the board, swallowing back the tightness in his throat. The timeline here is different. He realizes now that it was probably up on the board when he'd been here yesterday, but he'd been so preoccupied with the sudden sight of her that he hadn't had time to register anything else.

Cullen's movements in the days before her death are more fleshed out. There's a note about an interview with a coffee shop owner, some details from a bookstore patron, a couple unanswered questions about a financial advisor, all of which Castle has never seen. But they've barely dug into the potentially sordid affair she was having in the Bronx, and they haven't teased out any of her trip the week before to that dilapidated apartment complex.

He closes his eyes, exhales slowly, sifts through the bare facts of that morning two days ago. They hadn't found Jeff Yost, the man they'd discovered she'd been calling, in that worn building in the Bronx. Instead, they'd emerged empty handed to a car that exploded several heartbeats after Beckett opened the driver's side door.

Whether or not that bomb was related to the case, he suddenly doesn't mind that the details in this universe have gone somewhat differently.

He glances back at Beckett, who's entirely absorbed in whatever papers are tilted on her lap. He leans closer, twisting to try and peer at the file. "What's that?" he murmurs, angling a little further towards her.

Her head jerks up, her eyes dark and drowning. "Nothing. Just catching up on some old paperwork," she says, closing the folder abruptly and shoving it back into her desk.

She shakes her head once, a short, sharp jerk that seems to focus her and does nothing to dissipate the sinking feeling in his chets. There's too much in this world that he can't sift through, too much that's constantly eluding him. "What kind of old paperwork?"

She doesn't even bother to answer. "So we've gone through the three days before Cullen died with a fine-toothed comb. Found several calls to a blocked number that we're still looking into, but nothing else that sent up any flags."

"Boyfriends? Lovers?" he asks. _A series of quiet rendezvous in a less-than-savory section of the Bronx?_

"Not that we know of. We're going to ask the sister a few more questions, go back in her timeline a little more, keep working the blocked numbers. We're still waiting on a few results from the lab."

"You usually get here so early to wait on lab results and run down numbers?"

She's clicking through something on her computer, but she flicks her gaze toward him, levels him with an intense glare. "Yes," she says, her voice flat on the monosyllable.

He's about to ask for the phone records – he does know how to be useful, at least, and if he can be useful enough maybe she'll _want _him to stick around – but a wave of exhaustion washes through him in a sudden rush.

Shit.

Beckett glances over again as he blinks, shakes his head, takes a long gulp of coffee, but the sinking pull through his body is like nothing else, a hard drag towards unconsciousness that he's not sure how to even begin fighting. "It doesn't usually start picking up here until about eight," she says, gently giving him an out. He doesn't want to take it, but it's quickly seeming more and more like it's either that or pass out on her desk.

"I might take a quick walk," he says, standing carefully as a wave of dizziness presses into him.

"Have fun." He thinks he might hear the faintest layer of surprise in her voice, but he can't focus on that, not when it's taking every ounce of his energy to drag his feet one in front of the other.

He's just aware enough to stumble into the elevator, shove his shaking thumb into the basement button as he fights to keep his eyes open. His knees almost buckle as he steps out into the corridor, but he knows where he's heading, the supply closet just off the garage that's always open and that locks from the inside. He flips the deadbolt, can't help a faint rush of heat through his blood at the memory of the last time he did that, her mouth on his neck and his hands rucking up her shirt to span the soft skin of her lower back. But then his legs shiver and turn to water, his eyes slide shut, and he's drifting back down into darkness.

* * *

"—as soon as Alexis and Martha get here," he hears her saying, her voice a hushed whisper from the corner of the room.

"Gates already nixed you working the bombing. What do you think you're gonna _do?_"

"I just want a fresh set of eyes on it," she says.

"So you're saying you don't trust me and Ryan with this."

"Someone wanted us dead, Javi. Castle's been mostly unconscious for the better part of two days and can't _see_. You think I wouldn't want to be involved?"

"Beckett." Esposito's voice is a low, frustrated growl. "You're not even supposed to be out of bed. You've barely rested, and any kind of normal human would be lying there on a morphine drip. Your arm might –"

She makes a sharp shushing noise, and then Castle hears her rising, walking slowly over to him. He's not sure what he's done to let her know he's awake.

"Your arm might what?" he asks when he hears her stop beside his bed.

There's a rustle from the corner, a quiet and uncomfortable cleared throat. "I'm checking in with Lapinski and then heading back. Glad you're doing okay, Castle," Esposito says.

"Thanks," Castle responds.

The door opens and closes, and then they're alone, just the soft shuffle of her breath beside him. "So no leads, clearly," he says, trying for something she'll be willing to talk about.

"The charge was just behind the center console. They think it was a tripwire to the driver's side door."

"And no idea who set it."

"Not yet."

"The Cullen case?" he asks, feeling a far-away, dreamlike thread of worry tug at his stomach.

"No way to tell," she says, but there's a dismissiveness in her tone that mirrors his own feelings.

And yet – "Why then? Why set the bomb when the car was there and not -" he swallows, clears his throat – "not at your apartment? Or at the precinct?"

"If I could answer that, I wouldn't have said no leads."

He grits his teeth. "And you think you should be investigating instead of sleeping."

"I'm fine."

He lets that settle in the air, lets the lie wash over them both before he speaks again. "I'm flying blind here, Beckett," he finally murmurs.

She huffs a sigh. He tries to picture her face, tries to reach out through the darkness to understand if her jaw is tight with distress, if she's fighting back a smile at his ridiculousness, if her eyes are even now swimming with pain.

"Surely it's not still too soon," he says, but his heart isn't in it.

Her hand finally finds his forearm, her fingers flitting lightly over his skin. "Castle," she murmurs, her voice throaty with grief.

"Your arm –"

He hears her breathe out, a short, frustrated puff of air. "Was more shattered than broken. But it's fine now."

"Esposito didn't seem to think so."

He feels another long exhale at his chin just before her lips brush over his, slow and light and certain, drawing back just as he lifts a hand to brush it along the side of her neck. "Impacted fracture. Fourteen screws and a couple plates in there, and there was a tricky moment in surgery with the brachial artery."

His own exhale snags and snarls in his throat.

"It's fine," she says, her lips back on his, grazing his mouth so gently. "I'll be on desk duty for – a while. But it's going to be fine."

He tries to form words, but it's back again, the all-consuming exhaustion that turns his blood to lead, even though he's barely talked to her, barely been present, even though he wants nothing more than to stay and drag her into bed with him and feel her slowly sink into sleep at his side.

"Rest," she whispers into his mouth. "I know you don't want to, but you need to heal."

"You," he manages to rasp out, curling his fingers at her, but then she and the all-consuming darkness are both fading, ebbing quietly away.


	6. Chapter 6

At first, he's aware only of an aching throb in his knees and back, of the pulsing and inescapable return of sensation. For a heartbeat, he's still reaching out for Beckett, trying to tug her down to sleep beside him.

And then his eyes blink open to the sight of a stark concrete ceiling, the blunt end of a mop handle, and he realizes he's lying in the basement supply closet. He groans, shifts, tilts his head to glance down at his watch. He couldn't have been conscious (unconscious? He's still groggy, half asleep, and the worlds are tangling and untangling in a knot of confusion) for more than fifteen minutes, but – _nine o'clock? _

He lurches to his feet, crashes the back of his skull into a shelving unit hard enough to make him bite his tongue. As he stumbles out of the closet and over to the elevator, he straightens his collar and tries desperately to come up with any kind of reason that he could have possibly been gone for _two and a half hours._

When he steps off the elevator, Beckett's just standing up from her desk and sliding into a coat. The bullpen is alive now, the murmur of detectives striding around, passing coffee to one another, diving back into their cases. He almost bumps into no fewer than three of them as he hustles over to her desk.

She arches an eyebrow at him. "Hi, Castle," she says, her voice tripping over his name in a skeptical staccato.

"Hi – I was just –" he starts, then finds that every possible excuse has tangled in his brain. All he can do is hold up his phone and gesture to it like a wordless moron.

"No need to report to me," she says, shaking her head. "You're just in time to watch me leave, though."

"Where are we going?"

She blinks at him. "_I'm_ going to go talk to a possible acquaintance of our vic. You're going to – well, you can do whatever it is you do, if you feel like waiting until I get back."

"You're cutting me out of an _interview_?" he asks, unable to stop the whine that creeps into his tone.

"Surely Mr. Castle can tag along on this one," Castle hears over his shoulder. The words should be a relief, but he only just manages to suppress a flinch. The sound of Montgomery's voice resonating behind him is nothing he'll get used to anytime soon. "You're not bringing in a suspect, right?"

Beckett clenches her jaw. "No," she grits out, then must realize how belligerent she sounds. "Sir."

"Excellent. I'm sure Mr. Castle will appreciate the chance to see you operate outside the precinct," Montgomery says with absolutely no trace of irony.

"I'm sure he will," she replies, a little dryly.

"It's settled, then," Montgomery says, breezing toward the break room with his empty coffee mug in hand. Beckett spends an extra second staring at his back with narrowed eyes, clearly wondering how his timing was so impeccable and how he'd managed to ruin her entire morning in less than one minute.

"So, where're we going?" Castle asks, pasting on a brilliant smile as they walk through the bullpen. He's awake, Beckett's been ordered to let him tag along, and despite his earlier narcoleptic mishap, the hours still stretch before them, the long and endless hours in which he's sure he can make inroads into untangling whatever past they've had, into cultivating some kind of trust in their relationship.

Beckett glares at him as they step into the elevator and she hits the button for the garage. "Just south of Foxhurst in the Bronx."

His stomach drops. "Oh?"

She steps out of the elevator and stays a step ahead of him, not noticing his suddenly-clammy hands and racing pulse. "Cullen had been communicating with a Jeffery Yost fairly regularly until a week and a half ago. His number dropped off her records, and three days later a blocked number started showing up."

"Sounds coincidental," he murmurs, his voice only slightly strangled.

"There are no coincidences," she says, unlocking her car and sliding into the driver's seat before he can even suggest the subway.

He's left standing awkwardly in front of the hood, Beckett staring at him through the windshield like he's a complete idiot until he finally unsticks his feet, walks around, slides woodenly into the passenger seat.

She's silent as she guides the car out of the garage and navigates around a snarl of pedestrians, a stopping taxi. He's so distracted that it takes him an extra minute to realize she's paying more attention to her driving than she needs to, that her laser-like focus is a little too purposeful.

He drags in a long breath, pushes the air out of his lungs in an even slower exhale, repeats five times, ten times, fifty times, repeats until he feels some kind of steady calm wash over him. He is with Beckett. He is with Beckett, but he won't be for long unless he can pull himself together and act like something approximating a normal human.

"Nice ride," he says, tugging at the seatbelt that seems intent on choking him.

"I know you're not making fun of my car, Castle," she says, her eyes not straying from the street.

"I just think there would be a certain low-key level of irony involved in my being strangled to death by a safety belt in a cop car."

She rolls her eyes, but finally, finally, he sees the corner of her mouth twitch infinitesimally. "It's just temperamental. Passenger seat doesn't get a ton of use."

"I can tell. There's a spring in the front that seems hell-bent on destroying my hamstring," he says, but he can't entirely tamp down the wave of sadness that washes over him when he thinks of her spending all those hours alone in her car, the lonely late nights and the silent early mornings and the empty void in her life, in both their lives, that their partnership has filled.

"Yeah, well. First step in cop survival training," she says, and there it is again, the slight quirk of her mouth that means she's almost receptive to him.

"Detective Beckett, are you implying that there are going to be other steps to my survival training?"

"No," she says, dryly. "Just the one."

He opens his mouth to reply, but the morning sun streams through the windshield at just the right angle and catches the curve of her cheekbone, the dark fringe of her short hair, the near-unshakably straight line of her mouth, and the words trickle slowly back down into his chest.

She's avoiding him so studiously that he's free to stare, so he leans back into the seat, forgetting about the horrible spring and the strangling seatbelt, forgetting, for a moment, about any universe and any moment other than this.

But then the countless questions well in his throat, snarling hopelessly. "Before…" he says, lets it trail off, hoping he can glean some kind of information from her. The need to know is a sudden, vibrant thing, the need to know how it would have been possible for him to walk away from her in any world.

"Before nothing," she says, her jaw tightening, the hint of lightness immediately fading from her eyes.

"Beckett," he starts, but she's not willing to talk, and he has no angle from which he can push her.

They simultaneously sigh in frustration, and it's enough to make her glance over at him, her eyes flicking over his face before returning to the road. "Castle," she starts, his name barely a noise on her exhale, but then she's cutting herself off as she pulls to a stop outside the worn building. "We're here."

He feels his pulse kick up, a sharp and irregular thud against his sternum. "Do you want me to wait in the car?" he asks, trying not to let it sound like a plea.

She turns, quirks an eyebrow at him. "Really, Castle, I didn't peg you for the wait-in-the-car type."

"I'm all about taking proper precautions," he says as she unbuckles her seatbelt.

"No, come on. Montgomery _will _wind up hearing that I left you sitting here when I'm supposed to be giving you some kind of authentic experience."

"Yeah. Right then," he murmurs, stepping out after her and walking toward the apartment building. "Don't – don't forget to lock the car."

She pauses for a beat outside the front door. "You're pretty decent at writing about it, but I'm not sure the reality of police work agrees with you," she says skeptically.

"Just getting into the swing of things," he murmurs, trailing reluctantly after her, his steps leaden, his pulse thrumming through his body.

He blows out a long breath, tries to steady the tremor he can feel in his fingers. This world is different. It's two days later. But the similarities are stark and unmistakable:

The trudge up four flights on a narrow staircase, lit only with occasional dim and flickering bulbs.

The careful check of the apartment numbers, drawn in faded marker on the wall beside each entrance.

Beckett's steady, consistent knocking on a worn door, the smell of stale marijuana seeping steadily through.

Her eventual shrug and shake of her head five minutes later. The sigh she gives when she says, _Have to track him down, now._

But the odd silence between them isn't the same. The way Beckett won't even begin to break into a smile. The horrible, trembling tension that pulses through his blood.

They step back out into the clear morning sun, and he feels it choking him. "Beckett," he grits out. She slows but keeps walking toward the car. "Beckett," he tries again, reaching forward and snagging the edge of sleeve.

She spins sharply and jerks herself out of his grasp. "What is it, Castle?"

He swallows, gapes pathetically, tries to think of something, anything that won't make him sound like he's utterly insane.

"Okay," she says, drawing out the _a _so that she sounds especially skeptical. "Come on. Let's go."

She's by the back tire. He suddenly doesn't care if he sounds crazy. "Bomb," he breathes, stepping up to her, the air stuttering out of his lungs too quickly, his voice rushed and jumbled. "There's a bomb in the car."

She stares at him, her eyes softening. "Castle. Look. Everyone who reads Page Six knows this isn't a very good time for you. Why don't we get you back to the precinct, you can go home and get some sleep, and we'll try this again in a couple weeks." And then she's spinning around and opening the driver's side door and he's lunging too late to stop her.

He dives forward, barreling into her, grabbing her biceps as he rushes her backwards and shoves them to the ground, snapping his hands up to cradle the back of her head as they slam into the pavement.

For a fraction of a heartbeat everything is still and silent, and he's hyperaware of her. The heat of her stomach against his. The push of her chest into his pecs as she gulps in a gigantic breath. The soft silk of her hair against his fingers. The concave arc just at the bottom of her skull. The dilation of her pupils, angry and aroused, nearly eclipsing her irises. The glisten of her slightly parted lips in the sunlight.

And then the world is pulling apart in a rush of sound and heat and he is conscious of only her hands coming up to curl protectively around his head and then darkness, endless darkness.

* * *

He spirals up into consciousness to the sound of a groan and the strong press of fingers into his shoulder.

"It's just a nightmare, Dad," he hears, a low and worried whisper above him. He can still feel the searing heat of the bomb over his back, the lithe press of Beckett's body up into his, and reality is a kaleidoscope of sensations that for several minutes he can do nothing but breathe through.

Eventually the fragments join together, merge back into a sightless, stable world. "Hey, pumpkin," he says, his voice a rasp.

"Thank God," she whispers. "You wouldn't stop dreaming. I was about to call the doctor, but they'd just been in and said it was normal, and I wasn't sure what –"

"I'm sorry," he says. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to scare you."

She laughs, a strangled, frustrated sound that he never wants to hear from his daughter's mouth again. "Don't worry about it," she says.

"Was I –" he licks his lips, swallows dryly. "Was I out for long?"

"Beckett left with Esposito about four hours ago. She said you'd been asleep for half an hour."

He tries to puzzle it out, but he can't make the times line up, can't stitch together the two realities into any kind of sense. "Right," is finally all he murmurs.

"Gram's in the cafeteria getting coffee, but she should be back up soon. I think she's been surreptitiously stalking Doctor Weise whenever she's out of the room. I caught her muttering something about not wasting a perfectly good opportunity on her way out the door earlier."

Castle feels a tired smile stretch across his face. "That sounds like your Gram." And then, when she doesn't offer anything else – "And Beckett?"

Alexis sighs, hums something unintelligible in the back of her throat.

"She was in surgery, right? When I asked about her before."

"I didn't want to lie to you," Alexis says, sounding so miserable. "But she'd been so adamant, and in the end, she was right – there was nothing you could have done except worry."

"I'm not mad at you," he murmurs. "Of course I'm not mad at you." He's not sure how to direct the bright flare of anger he feels deep in his chest, but he knows it's not at his daughter.

"She's at the precinct right now. Signed out AMA but promised she would be back within a few hours."

"And Esposito let her?" Castle asks, hearing the growl of his voice but unable to tamp it down.

"I don't –" Alexis starts, stops, clearly frustrated. "I asked her to stay when Gram and I came in this morning. But she –"

He reaches out his right arm, feels his daughter's face press suddenly into his neck, her arms wrap around his torso as he encircles her back. "Baby, that's not your job. It's not your job to take care of either of us."

"I just don't want to see you hurt any more," she moans into his shoulder. The sound of it clogs his throat, makes his sightless eyes burn harshly.

"It's okay," he soothes, rubbing his arm in slow circles over her skin. "It's going to be okay."

She silent for a long time, breathing noisily against him, before she finally sucks in a deep inhale and pulls slightly away. "I know," she says. "It is."

"You think you can sneak me up a decaf from the cafeteria?" he asks. He suddenly longs for the acrid taste of coffee in his throat, suddenly craves a moment in the darkness when he doesn't have to think of anyone else's eyes on him.

"Yeah. Yeah, of course," she murmurs. "I'll be right back," and then she's squeezing his elbow and walking away.

He reaches up, pinches the bridge of his nose, gulps in a long breath, but almost immediately there's a different, heavier set of footfalls entering the room.

"Hello?" Castle calls.

"Mr. Castle," the man says, his voice so quiet, so placating. "You're a difficult man to find alone."

This is not a doctor.

"What do you want?" Castle asks, hears only silence in response. He takes the leap. "Why do you want to kill us?"

"Be careful who you cross, Mr. Castle," the voice says, suddenly right next to him.

He gathers air to scream, but he's barely made a noise when two steady, professional fingers press firmly into either side of his esophagus. He reaches out, wraps his hands around a muscular forearm and pushes, but he has no voice, no voice and no air. He thrashes, pulls, gapes for a breath that will not come, and then he's drowning dizzily down into a grey and unraveling world.


	7. Chapter 7

Someone is screaming.

It's shrill and panicked. For the space of several breaths, he is aware of only that noise.

More starts to filter in. Voices thread through the underlying quiet – _what just happened_, and _did you get hurt_, and _shit man, that's a cop car. _The sound of settling air, a quiet groan, a soft sinking hiss.

The metallic taste of blood.

The sharp scent of burning, rubber or metal or –

The roiling ground underneath him, soft, too soft to be –

"Wake the fuck up, Castle, right _now_."

He opens his eyes and _sees_ – and sees the frustrated, worried green of her eyes. And sees the panicked furrow of her forehead. And sees the blood streaming steadily from her temple.

"You're hurt," he gruffs, still trying to pull himself back into this world, still sucking in glorious, dizzying breaths of air.

"I wasn't the one who just passed out," she growls. The length of her body presses up into him, but she doesn't shove him off, doesn't make him move.

Her fingers trace firmly over his vertebrae, pressing, probing. He winces, hisses, feeling the pull of skin stretched tight from the heat of the bomb.

"Your back. Neck. Are you okay to move?"

He realizes, vaguely, that he must be crushing her, but he can't find it in himself to want to get up. Can't find it in himself to push away from her, knowing that once she's up she won't stop, won't take a moment to even consider a bleeding head or broken ribs or a shattered arm.

He gulps in a shallow breath and wonders idly if he's dead in that other fading world.

"How long was I out?" he rasps. He realizes his hands are still wrapped around the back of her head. He slowly stretches out his stiff fingers, presses his palms down against the asphalt to prop himself off her.

"Thirty, maybe forty seconds." The blood is still streaming thickly from her head.

"Okay," he murmurs, pushing himself slowly to his feet, feeling the world spin and spin before finally righting itself.

She's shoved herself up and is standing beside him, but she's canting forward, lifting her left hand toward her temple in an aborted move, swaying slightly. He cups her elbow with his palm, grabs her other hand in his when she doesn't steady all the way. "I'm fine," she grits out, trying to tug herself from his grip, but he wraps his fingers even tighter around hers, feels the damp heat of her skin against his, tries to ignore the sparks of sensation that fizz up his arm.

"Thanks for holding me up here, Beckett," he murmurs, chancing a shuffle closer to her still-unsteady body. "It would really be an assault on my manly prowess if I took a header to the pavement."

"Don't be an asshole," she growls at him, dragging herself away more assertively and managing to only slightly sway on her feet.

He vaguely registers a small crowd gathering on the sidewalk, a soft voice questioning if they're okay, but it's hard to concentrate on anything through the sudden and irrational gratefulness that swamps his chest, the choking surge of affection for the sight of the woman in front of him: the defiant glint of her eyes, the tense set of her shoulders, the frustrated clench of her jaw.

She blinks, sucks in a deep breath, rotates in a tight circle as she scans the still-gathering knots of people. "Anyone hurt?" she calls.

A few small noises of dissension sound out from various groups.

"Okay," she murmurs quietly. A siren wails in the distance, drawing slowly closer, and she snaps her head around in another quick scan before reaching down, wrapping strong fingers around his wrist, and dragging him off to the side of the street, toward a shadowed alley. A friendly-looking man from the crowd steps forward as if to say something to them, but Castle jerks his head sharply. The man lifts his hands and nods in acknowledgement, though Castle's not at all sure that he made the right choice.

At least if she kills him here, they'll be able to find his body.

She rounds on him as soon as they're out of sight, deep into the all-too-ominous darkness of the alley. "How the _fuck _did you know there was a bomb, Castle?" she growls.

"Just. Yes. Ah." The explosion's knocked his knack for storytelling right out of him, he realizes mournfully as he stutters.

She's somehow managing to glare fearsomely at him even though her eyes won't entirely focus on his face, even though it looks like her ability to remain upright is tenuous at best. He fists his hands against the wool of his pants, lets himself roll forward onto the balls of his feet, then back on his heels, sets up an infinitesimal rocking motion that is just enough to keep himself from lunging at her.

"Do you think maybe we should go see if there's an ambulance around?" he asks helpfully, trying for a smile.

She just stares at him, her eyes dilated and dark and so serious, a look that knocks him breathless for a moment. "Were you involved in this?" she whispers, her voice barely more than a breath of air.

The question alone is enough to make him teeter a step backwards. "You can't possibly think that," he says, even though it's very likely that she doesn't know him at all, even though she'd really have no reason to think otherwise.

"That's not an answer," she grits out.

"_No_," he hisses. "How can you – _no._"

"I should _arrest you_," she snaps, her face so pallid, the blood so stark against her pale cheek.

"Why the hell would I have warned you, Beckett?" he breathes, somehow still so staggered by her lack of faith in him.

"Why the hell would you have known there was a bomb?" she counters.

"Well it damn sure isn't because I _set it_," Castle growls.

"Look," she hisses. "I don't know what the hell is going on here. I don't have any idea what could have possessed you to suddenly show up again. I don't know why there was a bomb or how you could have known about it. But I want answers and I want them _now._" She looks furious, her eyes glinting darkly, her face a blanched and terrifying white.

It sucks the fight right out of him. "How about some medical attention first?" he asks quietly. He steps towards her, palms out, the need to help a palpable thing that claws at his stomach.

She almost looks wounded enough to accept, or at least not to fight him too much, but the edges of his sight start to fade to grey, a steady creep into his vision that has his knees slowly turning to water. "Castle," he hears, her voice tinny, echoing through a far away tunnel. "Shit. Castle, come on."

He can still see enough that she's reaching out to grab him, even though she's barely holding herself upright. He tries to tell her not to bother, but all that comes out is a quiet "Kate" across a puff of air before the chilled grey envelops him.

* * *

His throat hurts.

His throat _hurts_.

His throat hurts and his head pounds and alive, alive, he is alive.

He's vaguely aware that he's reclined, his head propped on worn denim, his legs bunched up in an awkward curl. There's the firm press of fingers against his chest, stroking up and down, up and down his sternum.

"Beck –" he starts, coughs, tries again. "Beckett."

"Hey, you," he hears, a throaty, worried kind of love lacing her tone.

"The bomb," he tries – but the fingers on his torso pause for a beat before resuming their trail, hesitant now, and he can feel the vibrating tension of the thigh underneath his head.

"Not quite."

Right. Yes. The bomb was somewhere else. Or - earlier. Just earlier. "Someone strangled me."

He feels some of the tension melt out of her, a choked, quiet laugh rippling through her body. "Yeah," she says.

"Who -" he starts, but then his body lurches forward, and the hand that was trailing over his ribcage wraps around his chest, steadying him back. "Where –"

He cuts himself off when her fingers trace lightly over his jugular, the sensation odd, bordering the edge of pain but still sending a flame of desire that licks through his throat and head and chest. "We're in Esposito's car. He's driving."

"Glad you're not dead. Again," he hears from the front seat.

"Why…" he starts, but he trails off, not even sure what he wants to know.

He can practically feel the heat of her smile somewhere above his cheek. "Are you just cycling through all the question words now?"

He tries for a grin, knows it comes out strained at best. "Maybe."

"I wanted you out of the hospital. We weren't sure who we'd be able to trust. I'm not certain where we're going, yet, but we're figuring it out."

"What happened?"

"It was your guard," she husks, her hand tripping up, stroking along his jaw. "I'd just come back from the precinct –" and he can hear it in her voice, in her slight pause, the hitch of anger and self-loathing.

"It's not your job to protect me," he says.

"Well, clearly it should be," she growls. "Lapinski – he wasn't outside your door, but I didn't even – I didn't even notice it."

He can't imagine how strung out on exhaustion and pain she'd have to be to miss something like that. "And then," he prompts.

"He was strangling you," she says. "You weren't moving."

Fuck. He can only imagine if the situation had been reversed. If he'd come back to the hospital room of a sightless Beckett to see her lying motionless with a man's hand wrapped around her throat.

"He got the drop on me," she continues, her voice a low and quiet rasp. "Plowed by me before I could stop him."

"Plowed by you," Castle intones flatly.

She sighs, continues. "Esposito and Ryan were right behind me. Ryan went to check on Martha and Alexis – he's still with them right now – and Espo went after the guy, but –"

"He had some kind of getaway plan," Esposito growls from the front seat. "I _had _him through the hospital, but as soon as we hit the street – nothing."

Beckett is silent as her hand strokes through his hair, her fingers scratching lightly over his scalp. "Do we know why?" Castle asks finally.

He can feel the pressure at his head lift slightly and then drop back down as she shrugs, lets out a small dissenting noise. "He'd been a cop at the 12th for the past six years. I – I knew him, vaguely. Worked a case or two with him."

The combination of anger and grief that knots in his throat hurts more than the echoing burn of his erstwhile guard's fingers. All the small and all the colossal ways her trust has been betrayed. "So I'm the target," he gets out, finally.

"We don't know that," Esposito chimes in from the front seat. "He was clearly waiting on an opportunity – he could have easily walked in and taken out Martha and Alexis before strangling you, but –"

"Javi," Beckett whispers, her voice harsh and grating. Castle's stomach clenches and won't release.

"It's _true,_" Esposito defends, but his voice drops an octave, a little lower, a little softer. "Anyway – Beckett hasn't been anywhere near alone since this started. No good opportunities."

"We're still working on the why," Beckett murmurs, her voice quiet, defeated. "And the how."

He reaches awkwardly above his head, strokes the just of her hipbone through the denim of her jeans. "Go back to the part where this guy ran you over to get out of the room."

He feels her drag in a deep breath beneath him. "I'm okay. Really."

Esposito's sigh echoes too loudly through the silent car. "Beckett," he chastises.

"I got a cut. It's fine."

"Espo," Castle says, tries not to sound like he's begging, tries not to sound like he's so angry that he could reach out and slam his fist into the nearest solid surface.

"Near as I can figure he caught her in the temple with the butt of his gun. We wanted to get her checked out at the hospital, but she was insistent that there was absolutely no way it was safe to stay there for either of you." Esposito pauses. "It looks like it's still bleeding a little, Beckett," he murmurs.

"It's _fine_," she hisses.

The vision is too clear – the early-morning sunlight, the severe fringe of her dark hair, the stark crimson of the blood against her pale face and the panicked voices far away in the background. But this isn't – that's not – "You got pistol-whipped," Castle supplies, feels it snarl in his already-aching throat, and another vision of her suddenly stands out starkly in this too-dark reality:

Her walking into his hospital room. Her arm encased in gigantic, bulky cast. The line of her spine stiff as she fights against the pain of her broken ribs. The pale, exhausted set of her jaw. The curling panic at the sight of him, unconscious in his hospital bed, his guard's fingers pressing into his neck. The fumble to get to a gun she wouldn't have been carrying. Her sluggish jolt to save him. The slam of a pistol into her temple, the crumple of her knees. The way she would have dragged herself back onto her feet, lunged toward him, the frenetic beat of her heart jolting against her ribs. The frantic terror she would have felt in the seconds it took her to find a pulse.

"Espo came back up after Lapinski got away. I had Ryan stay with Martha and Alexis just in case, and Espo helped me get you in a chair so we could get you out of there."

He pushes off her lap, ignoring her murmur of protest. "How long have you been bleeding?"

"It's not –"

There's a throbbing ache at his forehead that he doesn't think is the result of any of the physical trauma that's happened to him over the past few days. "You're gonna give the blind guy a complex, Beckett, if we keep having quite such a catastrophic failure of communication."

"Forty, forty-five minutes," he hears her say, a small and miserable murmur.

He fumbles at his scratchy cotton collar for a moment, realizes he's dressed in just a hospital gown and light jacket. Sighing, he drags the jacket off his shoulders and balls it up, shivering at the chill of the air through just the thin fabric of the gown. "Where?" he asks.

"Please lie back down," she says, her voice still lacking any hint of authority.

"Beckett," Esposito growls warningly from the front.

He feels the moment the final bit of fight melts out of her, feels the tension release out of her body, feels it all even though she's not touching him. "Here," she whispers, grabbing his wrist, bringing his finger up to brush lightly over the slick slide of heat at her temple.

He wraps the jacket around his other hand and reaches up, presses the material firmly to her skin, feels the flinch ripple through her body and her breath grow slightly faster. He keeps the jacket pressed to her head, wipes the blood from his hand onto his hospital gown before his fingers return to her face, travel gently inward from the curve of her ear, slide over a different kind of dampness. "Kate," he whispers, rubbing his thumb over the moisture, the soft curve of her cheekbone, the paper-thin skin just under her eye, as more and more liquid soaks his fingers.

"I'm so sorry," she rasps.

He leans toward her, their bodies falling into an awkward embrace in the back of the cop car, his left hand stemming the blood from her temple, his right hand sweeping after her tears, as Esposito drives on and on in endless darkness.


	8. Chapter 8

He opens his eyes to a concerned grey stare.

"Welcome back," the man says, sounding far too chipper. Castle experimentally flexes his calves, abs, biceps, realizes he collapsed onto the cold concrete of the alley.

"Yeah," he groans, shoving himself up onto his elbows. "Thanks."

"Take it easy," the guy says, pushing at Castle's shoulder to try and keep him down.

Castle resists, pressing back up. "I think I was lying on a hypodermic needle," he says, which is enough to make the pressure at his shoulder instantly release.

"I'll make sure they give you a tetanus shot at the – oh. You weren't serious."

"Rick Castle," he says, blinking to clear the remaining haze from his vision as he sits fully upright, sticks his hand out.

"Dan McCammack," the man says, grinning as he squeezes Castle's hand. "EMT. We were the first on scene. The writer?"

Castle blinks, glancing sharply around the alley. "What? Oh. Yeah, the writer. Look – I was here with a woman - five ten, short dark hair, really gorgeous –"

Dan points over Castle's shoulder. He pushes himself to his feet and spins unsteadily around to see her sitting on the ground with her head between her knees and her back pressed against the brick wall. Another EMT, this one looking far more grizzled and far less chipper, is hovering over her as she growls at him, words that Castle can just make out as he slowly approaches.

"—told you I was fine, can you just _please _go check on the man who was with me?"

"You _do _care," Castle chirrups, flopping down to the ground to sit directly in front of her, practically on her feet. With her head between her knees he can't see much of her face, but if the slump of her shoulders is anything to go by, she's barely holding it together.

"About all the paperwork I'd have to do if Montgomery found out I'd gotten a civilian, a civilian who hasn't even signed any kind of release, exploded," she grumbles, but there's a thread of relief through her tone that belies her words.

The EMT works at getting closer, trying to maneuver his stethoscope toward her, and she finally lifts her head an inch and levels him with a somehow-still-fearsome glare. "I know you're not going to put that thing on my chest without my permission," she grits out, the pale cast of her skin and the blood smeared down her face making her threat utterly terrifying.

"Have it your way," the man sighs, shifting away from her but staying close.

"Check him out, though," she says, gesturing loosely towards Castle with her wrist. "Current intermittent loss of consciousness, and even before the bomb he showed signs of dizziness, confusion, short periods of extreme fatigue…" she trails off, sighing.

"You _really _do care," he says, reaching out and tapping the side of her knee in a gesture he tries to masquerade as a tease, tries not to let his desperation to touch her shine through.

"I'm a _detective_," she hisses, low enough that her voice won't carry to the paramedics, "and I don't know what you think you're playing at, but you owe me a whole world of explanations."

"Sir?" Dan asks, shifting a little closer. "If you'll just step over to the ambulance with us?"

He stares at Beckett. "I'll go if you'll go."

"Like I'd let you out of my sight," she mutters, shoving herself unsteadily to her feet. He stands slowly next to her, catching her muttering under her breath something about _potential felon _and _detailed foreknowledge of an explosive device in my cruiser_.

"I'm okay with that," he tells her as they make their way toward the ambulance.

* * *

By the time the paramedics have finally finished cleaning and bandaging her temple, the scene has transformed. There's a web of crime scene tape up, a cluster of cop cars, a throng of uniforms, a smattering of guys from CSU. A productive and businesslike chatter echoes into the back door of the ambulance.

They've shined lights in his eyes and prodded at his head for far longer than he'd anticipated, and Dan seems almost despondent at his lack of additional concussion symptoms. "You really should go to the hospital," the EMT says for the eleventh or twelfth time.

"I'm good," he says again, staring intently at the still-pale curve of Beckett's cheek. He'd clambered right up into the ambulance with her, ignoring her fearsome glare and Dan's murmured urges to hop into the ambulance ten feet away. "Unless you feel like a field trip, Beckett," Castle says. Both EMTs have long-since giving up on convincing her to leave the scene.

"We'll struggle through, somehow," she says dryly, abruptly pushing away from her still-hovering medic, hopping out of the ambulance, and walking over to where Montgomery and Ryan and Esposito stand at the charred metal of her squad car's door. Castle murmurs a _thanks_ at the EMTs and trails after her.

"The medics clear you?" Montgomery asks skeptically as they stop in front of him. Esposito's standing on high alert, his eyes roaming over Beckett with a sharp kind of concern that Castle appreciates.

"We're both good to go," Beckett replies, which is, Castle supposes, close enough to the truth.

"Well, I've learned my lesson," Montgomery says. "Mr. Castle, the NYPD is deeply apologetic for the inconveniences caused by today's incident. I've already spoken to the Chief of Detectives, and we're going to be extensively reevaluating the process we go through to grant access to ride-alongs throughout all precincts. I'd be happy to have an officer give you a ride home."

"That won't be necessary," Castle says in a too-fast rush. "Now that I have an extreme personal investment in the case, I'd really like to see how it all plays out."

Montgomery's already shaking his head. "The Chief of Ds was quite insistent, Mr. Castle. Especially due to the increased danger of the case, I can't allow you to continue."

"Sir," Beckett starts, her voice low and rational, and Castle closes his eyes for an heartbeat, sure that this is it, sure that he'll be shoved back to Greenwich where he'll spend the rest of the night drinking a beer and throwing the ball to Gus and trying not to think of every way that he has tried and failed to protect her. "Castle's a witness, now."

"Ryan and Esposito will get a statement from him before he goes," Montgomery says, nodding shortly at them and preparing to stride away.

Castle watches her intently as she takes a deep breath, plows relentlessly ahead. "With all due respect, we're not even sure who the target was, Sir."

Montgomery pauses, arresting his turn. "You really think it could have been Castle?"

She heaves a sigh. "I don't know. There's not a lot that makes sense about this right now, but I think it would be irresponsible to let Castle out of our protection until we've gathered more information."

He sees the hesitation on Montgomery's face. "Strictly off the books," Castle adds. "I'm not looking for a lawsuit. I'm not looking to cause trouble. I just want to see this case through."

The Captain stares at him for a moment like he knows _exactly _what Castle really wants to see through, but in the end he sighs and nods. "Let's just keep this quiet," he says, turning and striding away.

Esposito and Ryan are staring at Beckett with identical looks of disbelief. "What. It was all _true_," Beckett snaps at them.

"Right," Ryan says, his eyes narrow and suspicious as he starts to turn slowly away. "C'mon, Espo. I think Romano is waving us over."

Castle doesn't even try to contain his smile as they stand in front of the seared frame of her car.

"You _know _why I don't want you leaving," she hisses. "You're lucky I didn't tell Montgomery the whole story."

"Why didn't you?"

"What?"

"Why didn't you tell him?"

"I don't know," she snaps. "Maybe I should right now."

"No, come on, Beckett. You're a – you seem like a stickler for protocol. Why wouldn't you give your Captain all the information?"

She sighs, reaches up and pinches the bridge of her nose between her thumb and her forefinger. "Because the facts make it look like you were involved in setting that bomb."

He knows the breadth of his smile must be making him look especially moronic, but he can't seem to stop. "And you know I'd never do that."

Her fingers stay clamped firmly on her nose. "I have no idea what you're capable of, Mr. Castle. But I think that investigating you would send us around on a hell of a wild goose chase that wouldn't get us any closer to ultimately figuring out either who set the bomb or who murdered Elizabeth Cullen."

She turns away from him abruptly, walks over to where Esposito and Ryan are getting the CSU run-down from the man who appears to be Romano. He trails after, too satisfied to even be annoyed that he's never in stride with her, that he's always a step behind.

"How's it looking?"

"Still determining the exact type of charge, but it was definitely located just behind the center console and trip wired to the door."

He stares down at the sidewalk, breathes out a short sigh, not sure whether it makes it better or worse that it's all so much the same. When he lifts his head, Beckett's watching him intently, her eyes narrowed, her jaw set. "What's going on with the rest of the scene?" she asks, a note of suspicion rumbling at the edge of her contralto.

"We're still working it," Esposito says. "We have a couple unis canvassing for witnesses, but so far no dice, and there's no official cameras on this section of block."

"You should – change," Ryan says, his eyes flicking over her torso. "Maybe get some rest. If you're really not going to go by the hospital."

Castle realizes he's been so relieved at the sight of her, vibrant and alive in front of him, so entranced by the fierce darkness in her eyes and the frustrated tapping of her slim fingers, that he's paid almost no attention to the vivid blood that's soaking her shirt.

She glances down at herself, shrugs in acknowledgement. "You guys ride together?"

"No, Esposito was uptown at a –" Ryan cuts himself off when he realizes why she's asking. "Maybe you shouldn't be driving, though?"

"I'm fine," she says, her tone leaving absolutely no room for argument.

Ryan just sighs, tosses over his keys. "I'm kind of scared to loan it to you, Beckett," he says, glancing at the twisted wreck of her car.

"Say your goodbyes now," she replies wryly, twisting the car key off the ring.

"Speaking of," Esposito says, a little too nonchalant, "You've got a couple units assigned to you."

"Seriously?" she grits out.

"I'm hoping this goes without saying, but you just got car bombed, Beckett. Don't be an idiot." He doesn't say _like usual_, but Castle catches the hint of it at the end of his sentence.

"Awesome," she hisses, spinning around with the key clenched tightly in her hand. Castle catches the uniforms moving to follow at the edge of his vision.

"Wrong way, Beckett," Ryan calls after she's walked several steps.

Castle manages to ruthlessly suppress all but the tiniest breath of laughter as she whirls back around and stalks down the street. He trails behind, admiring the purpose of her stride, the quick and angry snap of her heels, the lithe lines of her legs. The second they reach Ryan's sedan, two squad cars pull up behind them. She breathes out a slow, irritated breath.

He feels it as soon as he folds down into the lumpy upholstery, the claw of unconsciousness that sinks down from his torso and drags, drags him hard into the seat. He struggles against the sucking pull, but his eyes are sliding shut before he can do more than valiantly try to prop them open. His arms are too heavy, his fingers too thick to even begin to fumble with the safety belt. "I'm gonna take a nap," he slurs, the words sluggish on his tongue.

"Are you for –" he hears, and then just the soft wash of unconsciousness.


	9. Chapter 9

"Well, you'll just have to get the chair out, Espo," he hears her hiss. Her hand is skittering over his bare knee, her fingers stroking a pattern too fast to be soothing. She stills suddenly, and when she speaks again her voice has transformed to a soft and quiet lilt. "You awake?"

He swallows, licks his lips. "Yeah. Did I –" he starts, but he can't finish, can't quite find a graceful way to ask _Do I keep passing out into what seems like an unconscious oblivion, and have you noticed anything specific while I've been insentient that would indicate some fairly vivid and unusual dreams?_

"It's been hard to wake you up, a couple times," she murmurs, then continues in a tone that's too forcefully bright. "We just got to an FBI safe house in Yonkers."

"FBI?"

"They've been involved in the bombing investigation."

"Is it –" He pauses, swallowing, and tries to phrase his question about the actual safety of said safe house.

"It's safe enough for now," Beckett says. "No one knows about it except for a handful of higher-ups at the FBI."

"I'll be on guard downstairs at the only entrance, and Ryan'll get here soon," Esposito says. "You can both get some rest upstairs while we figure out our next move."

"The FBI has a couple of agents on your family," Beckett murmurs to him before he can voice the question.

"How do we know…" he rasps, but he can't finish. How do they know that the safe house is safe, that his family is fully protected, that someone else in a uniform won't show up with a sniper's rifle or a bomb or just their own two hands and an unshakable strength.

"It'll be okay," she says, her voice rough with determination. "Come on."

She wraps her fingers around his wrist and tugs him over to her side of the car, then pulls him slowly out the door. He feels the unsteadiness of the pressure, the flex and fade of her fingers. "Your head?" he asks as he stands beside her. "And arm?"

"Blood stopped just before you passed out on me." The _again_ lingers in the air. "Good as new."

"Of course," he sighs as she guides him away from the car.

It's oddly dizzying, following after her in the darkness. He realizes after several stumbling steps that this is the first time he's walked since the bomb. The air ripples, the ground rocks erratically beneath him, and he fights to find his balance in the rolling blackness.

The concrete is cold and rough against his bare feet, but there's a thin kind of heat sliding down onto his cheek, neck, hand. "What time is it?" he asks. He somehow keeps defaulting to night, even though some part of him has to know that's impossible. He supposes something deep in his subconscious is trying not to let him ponder all the daylight he's been missing.

"Three," she says as she leads him slowly forward. "In the afternoon," she adds after a pause.

"Oh," he murmurs. He supposes the time of day doesn't really matter.

They shuffle onward for a quiet beat before her voice vibrates through the darkness. "Stair."

He lifts a leg, still manages to catch his toe on the top of the step. He sways forward, feels her other hand slide underneath his elbow, feels the flinch ripple through her body as she grabs him.

"Got it?" she roughs, her voice raw.

"Please don't," he growls, finding his feet and bringing his hand up to rest on her hip. _Please don't patronize me. Please don't use your own injured arm to keep me from falling._

The bunched muscles of her side are already loosening under his palm, her body quietly yielding under the contact. "Sorry," she breathes, but that's not what he wants. He wants to walk her up the stairs and have her sit on the couch (or the bed, or whatever furniture happens to be there) while he finds her something to eat; he wants to drag her shirt over her head, push her back onto the sheets, trail his fingers over the contours of her ribs, watch her eyelids flutter shut as she sinks into a deep and quiet sleep.

He feels her body nudge forward into his, feels the damp heat of her mouth at his jugular, feels the light brush of her lips against the soft skin at the base of his throat, feels the slow and quiet puffs of her breath against him. He brings an arm around her back, draws her body further into his, revels in the weak warmth of the waning sun at the back of his neck and the sparkling vibrancy of her at his chest.

"Hey." Esposito's voice is pitched low, but it startles Castle, makes him tilt awkwardly onto the balls of his feet.

Beckett inhales sharply, her lips sweeping briefly over his throat before she jerks away. In the hand that's still resting on her hip, he can feel the tension ripple back through her, and he suddenly understands what a dumb idea it is, what a goddamn dumb idea, to be standing with her in the broad daylight knowing that someone is trying to kill them both.

"I doubled back a few times and didn't see any tails, but…" Esposito trails off, his voice still hushed, apologetic.

"I know. I know that," Beckett says, the sharp edge of self-recrimination in her words. She pulls away, toward the door to the safe house, Castle guesses, but he curls his fingers at her hip before she gets more than a step.

"Please don't," he says again.

She doesn't ask. "Okay," she whispers, tugging him forward, through the doorway, so carefully up the stairs, then slowly through a long and flat abyss.

His knees start to turn to water as the muffled noiselessness of sleep descends, drowning out everything else. "I need to –" he slurs.

"I see it. You're alright," she murmurs. The muscles in his legs go slack right as she starts guiding him down, and the last thing he feels is the soft give of a comforter underneath him and the sweep of her lips over the tip of his index finger.

* * *

His cheek burns.

He registers a firm, reverberating strike, the sting of cold air and an increase in the fiery throb.

He opens his eyes as he flattens himself instinctively back against what he realizes is the passenger door. Beckett's hand is about a foot from his face and seems poised to hit him. Again, he realizes.

"I'm awake!" he yelps, then hopes that was the reason he was getting slapped in the first place.

She drops her hand, her dark eyes flicking over his face. "We're going to the hospital."

"We really don't have to do that," he responds reflexively. "Unless you need to. You know. For your head."

Her stare turns incredulous. The setting sun shadows her jaw, makes the spikes of her dark hair seem somehow less severe. "You are _not _serious right now."

"I'm alright," he says, hearing the echo of his Beckett's low and wrecked voice as he speaks the words.

"What's going on?" she hisses.

"Don't know what you mean," he tries, but she's already plowing ahead without even acknowledging him.

"What kind of deranged medical condition do you have that you failed to tell me about before we left the precinct? How the hell did you know about that bomb? Why are you suddenly so fixated on following me around?" She fires off the questions with narrowed eyes and the stare that she usually reserves for the most derelict suspects.

He sighs, sucks in a breath, hears the words falling from his mouth before he can even think about stopping them. "I'm from another universe," he informs her, keeping his voice as steady, as serious as possible.

She stares at him for a long and silent beat in which he thinks she might actually be considering it, in which he can imagine her turning the information over and around in her mind.

"Or. Well. An alternate timeline," he says into the silence of her stare. _Shut up shut up_, his brain relays to his mouth, but then they're sitting there in a hush that he alternately decides is brimming with hope and full of desolation.

"Fuck you," she finally says, her words clear and calm, and then she's turning resolutely away from him as she jams the car into gear and slams her foot down on the accelerator. He's flung back against the seat as she squeals out onto Third Avenue.

"I'm not sure that –"

"Shut up," she says through clenched teeth.

"I just –" he starts, but then she's reaching out and punching the radio on and furiously twisting the volume until the low and pulsing base of some incomprehensible pop drowns out absolutely everything else.

He stares at her, the rigid curve of her jaw, the flex of her fingers on the steering wheel, and he decides the only thing he's truly surprised by is the extent of her anger. She doesn't glance over at him, doesn't seem like she's going to spare him a second thought, so he uses the opportunity, settling back against the seat, letting his eyes soak in the tense lines of her profile, the too-controlled rise and fall of her chest.

He can't have been staring for that long, he _can't_ have, but suddenly she's jerking the car off the road and into a parking space and he's exhaling a huff of disappointed air.

He thinks he could look at her forever.

She twists the key and pulls it from the ignition with a sharp flick of her wrist, then turns to stare at him. "Come on," she growls.

"I get to come?" he asks, stupidly, dazedly, but he can't imagine that one of the top things on Beckett's to-do list right now is allowing him into her apartment.

"If you think I'm letting you out of my sight for _one second_, even with the two units down here, you've got another thing coming," she says.

"Oh." It should make him unequivocally happy, the knowledge that this bristling, hostile version of Beckett won't ditch him the first chance she gets, but it tugs at him, hurts him in a way it has no right to hurt. He doesn't want to think that he's already damaged whatever fragile trust had existed between them.

He blinks, resolutely shaking it off, making himself hop brightly out of the car just after she slams her door.

But this isn't her apartment.

Or – rather – this isn't her apartment anymore.

They're standing in front of a grey concrete building in East Village that he hasn't seen in years. There's no reason for his legs to freeze, no reason for his heart to thud double-time against his sternum, no reason for him to choke on his sudden shallow inhale. Of course this is still her apartment here, here in this universe where he never managed to infiltrate her life. Undoubtedly, she doesn't have a bullet scar in the center of her chest, either.

"Let's _go_," she snaps, the sound of her voice making his eyes trip over to her. She's already most of the way across the street.

"Right. Yeah. Sorry," he calls. It's hard to force the words out through the tightness in his throat.

He can't shake the eerie, uncanny feeling as he follows her through the entrance to the building, up the two flights of narrow stairs, down the broad white corridor, walking the same path as years ago, moving along a route he never expected to travel again.

She pauses with the key in the deadbolt, her whole body going suddenly still as his gaze greedily traces the gold curves of the _203 _on her door.

"It's not going to work," she says, turning and pinning him with a deadly serious glare. At least she's making eye contact, he supposes.

"What's not going to work?" he asks. He doesn't even have to feign cluelessness.

"You. Acting so stunned and dazed."

"Oh," he says.

She huffs a breath. "If you need to go to the hospital, let me know. Otherwise, pull yourself together, because you are _not _going to get my sympathy."

He manages a small smile. "I wouldn't expect anything less."

She eyes him skeptically for a beat, then opens the door. He follows her across the threshold, staring unabashedly at her apartment, around the living room that he'd barely gotten to see before it had been blown apart. She hums disapprovingly, and he drags his gaze back to her threatening face. "You stay right here. Do not touch anything. Do not look at anything. Do not do anything."

"Do not. Right. I got it."

She stalks into the bedroom. He stands rooted to the spot, blinking at the glass and stonework of the kitchen, the spectrum of spines on her built-in bookcase, the shimmering circle of her chandelier. He's only just started wandering toward the books lying in an alluring, messy stack on an end table when she emerges, tugging a blue boat neck over her hips. There's a split second when he sees a strip of her abdomen just at the top of her dress pants, a flash of pale skin that makes his breath catch, that freezes him in his tracks.

"Stop staring," she snaps uselessly as she closes the door. He's never been able to stop staring at her, and there's something about this Beckett, with her spiky hair and narrowed eyes and hostile demeanor, some echo of the past that he can't help but helplessly watch.

"Sorry," he says, but he thinks from the way her glare in no way diminishes that she can tell he's not sorry at all.

"Let's go. We gotta get back to the precinct."

But his feet stick. There's so much here, so much that's unrecoverable, so much that his Beckett will never have again. He just needs one more minute. One more minute to see. "Can I have some water?"

"No. Come on."

He swallows exaggeratedly. "My throat tastes like ash."

She blinks. "There was no ash."

"My throat tastes like bomb."

There's a hint of amusement in her too-long blink before she spins, walks into the kitchen, stands up on her toes and drags a glass down from a shelf. "And then we're going," she says in warning.

He drifts over, compelled by her, magnetized to her. "Whatever you want," he says.

She pauses, the glass an inch above the counter, the steel of her gaze suddenly boring into him. "You know what I want," she says, her voice low, all traces of amusement instantly gone.

"I told you," he says.

"You haven't told me anything."

He shrugs. _I told you the truth_, he thinks at her, but he won't say it, not again.

"I need to know who set that bomb and why," she's growling, and for the first time this universe feels unreal, spinning away from him in a too-fast spiral, and the floor is rolling and his stomach is sinking and the light is hazing out of focus. He'd think it was a rush toward unconsciousness, but he knows better. He's felt it two other times when he'd stood in her apartment – her next apartment – and argued with her, when he'd fought and railed and still felt her slipping steadily and irrevocably away from him.

"I don't know," he murmurs, his voice hushed.

"Tell me who set that bomb," she grits out.

"Damnit, Beckett, I'd tell you if you knew!"

She growls, slams the glass firmly into the counter, and through some quirk of luck or some preexisting fracture the thing shatters.

For a beat everything is quiet and still. Somehow as they argued he'd drifted improbably nearer to her, so they're close, just a foot apart. Close enough that he can see the vivid and immediate well of blood in the delicate webbing between her thumb and index finger.

"Fucking great," she growls, staring down at her hand, at the shattered glass.

"Oh, oh, that's bad," he says, idiotically, watching the blood slowly spill over the ridge of her knuckle and splash darkly onto the counter.

He hears her heave a sigh and then she's turning away, pivoting to the oven and reaching out toward what he sincerely hopes is a mostly-clean dishtowel.

"Let me go get something for it. I'll be right back," he murmurs, hustling across the living room.

He opens the door to her bedroom, hears her behind him as he steps inside, her voice high and clear and panicked. "Castle –"

But he needs to get something sterile, some kind of alcohol wipe, some kind of bandage. If her willingness to disregard her own health after that bomb was any indication, she won't be taking care of it herself. He briefly prays that things here are the same, that her medical supplies will be in a cabinet under the sink. He beelines for the bathroom, barely throws an appreciative glance around her bedroom – the dark navy blue of her comforter, the slim grey divan under her window, the wooden dresser –

He stops. Turns slowly around. His blood is sluggish in his veins, his heart thudding a too-slow tempo that beats down through his stomach and thighs and calves, making him sway on his feet.

The wall opposite her bed is a black-and-white starburst of index cards, stark lines of names and dates and the jagged curves of question marks in black sharpie, all interspersed with pictures of ghosts. Raglan. McAllister. Her mother in that alley.

He's aware, vaguely, of her presence entering the room. He even succeeds in dragging his gaze away for a split second, managing to flick his eyes briefly over her (the butterflied bandage on her temple, the dishtowel pressed against her hand, a streak of blood at the bottom of her formerly-clean shirt) before his gaze is pulled back to that wall.

She draws up beside him, and he can feel the anger that simmers just beneath her quiet acceptance. "Shit," she murmurs, her voice calm and steady.

"Yeah," he says, and then he drops abruptly into darkness.


	10. Chapter 10

"—and if you accuse me of _handling you _once more, Kate Beckett –"

"Lanie, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. But how the hell can you blame me?"

"Look, girl, I get it. He should be in a hospital, and I can't give you a reason for his unconsciousness any more than Woodlawn and all those specialists could for his blindness. But at least his vitals are stable and he's lucid –"

"I told you about the time he woke up thinking the bomb had knocked him out instead of strangul–"

Lanie cuts her off sharply. "—And you said he seems to be _relatively _lucid and pain-free when he _is _awake. _You_, on the other hand –"

"I'm fine."

Lanie plows ahead. "You're exhibiting symptoms of severe exhaustion and a decent amount of blood loss, if the way you keep clutching that shattered arm of yours against your stomach when you think nobody's looking is any indication, you're experiencing a hell of a lot of pain, and you just managed to slice your hand open while you were trying to chop an apple."

"That could have happened to anyone."

Castle sits up abruptly, the room rotating in the dizzying darkness before settling out. "You what?"

There's a pause, then a shuffle of motion toward him. "Castle. Hey."

The raw sound of her voice puts him right back in front of that wall, the panic pounding hard through his veins, and the air stagnates in his lungs for a beat with his desperate worry over both Becketts.

He hears her footfalls halt beside the bed and he reaches out, snags her hand, trails his fingers to the delicate webbing between her thumb and forefinger, hits a knoll of tape and gauze. Sucks in a long and helpless drag of air.

Another voice sounds quietly from the foot of the bed. "Hi, Castle."

"What's up, Lanie?" he manages to force through his too-tight throat.

"You know what day it is?"

"Seriously?"

Beckett's fingers, which have somehow wound up loosely clasped around his, tighten painfully. He likes Lanie, he does, but he wishes more than anything that she would go away. He hasn't been alone with Beckett in so long, not since they stood and stared at the mess of taped-up index - not since Esposito had left them in the hospital room. And before then, not since he'd woken to the touch of her fingers stroking along his forehead.

"Do I sound like I'm joking to you?"

"I'm not concussed, Lanie," he sighs.

"Then you have any brilliant insight into why you keep dropping out of consciousness with absolutely no notice?"

"I get sleepy?"

Beckett's fingers tighten even further. "It's not funny, Castle."

"It sure as hell isn't," the ME adds.

Castle bristles. They're not in an ideal situation, but Beckett, at least, knows better than to deny him his coping mechanisms. At least she does when she's not exhausted, when she's not scared and in pain and strung out. The fight leaves him as quickly as it came. "I'm sure you examined me when I was out. Did I seem concussed?"

"No," Lanie says, sounding vaguely annoyed with it. "You're not exhibiting any traditional symptoms except for the unconsciousness, but they haven't been able to find any traditional causes for your blindness either and that sure as hell hasn't kept you from being blind."

"Lanie," Beckett hisses.

Even in the darkness, he can envision the ME's apologetic shrug. "Look, you wanted my professional opinion, and it's that both of you need to be back in a hospital ASAP. You need me, I'll be with Ryan in the living room."

Her footsteps click away, and then, finally, blissfully, there is just the sound of Beckett: the soft stumble of her breaths, the quiet scrape of denim as she shifts, the near-inaudible sigh of her thumb rubbing small circles over the back of his hand.

"C'mere," he gruffs, tugging at their loosely-joined fingers.

"I should go check in with Ryan," she says, but he feels the hesitation in the hitch of her voice, hears the gravel of exhaustion underneath her words.

"You should lie down and debrief me," he tries, tugging a little harder. "I know I've been missing stuff, and, Beckett, I'm already in the dark."

"Not funny," she huffs, but through her hand he can feel the sway of her body toward him, feel her cant toward the bed, lured by the promise of him and of rest.

He's not tired, for some unfathomable reason, but he slides back down, lets go of her hand, and waits. And waits. "You staring at me?"

"Should have known you were faking," she tries. "And debrief you? Really?" The mattress shifts, and he's rewarded with the gradual press of her body into his, the warm and tense length of her softening against him. He feels the knot in his chest release, the relief twining up his throat, snarling just behind his larynx, burning behind his eyes.

"That's the spirit," he gets out, not sure whether he's talking about the joking or the fact that she finally, finally seems like she might rest. He presses closer, feels the hitch of her breath, carefully grabs the elbow of her injured arm and maneuvers the cast to rest at the bottom of his ribcage.

He brings his hand back to her, runs his fingertips over the ridges of her spine, the thin cotton of her shirt catching on his dry and roughened skin. He hits the thickness of the bandage over her ribs, and catches it in his chest - the bulk of the cloth there, the weight of her cast on his ribs, the thought of the gash on her temple, the slice on her hand. He breathes deeply, lets his hand once again drift slowly upward, tries not to stutter in surprise at the sudden tickle of her hair against his knuckles.

He wasn't expecting it to be so long.

"There's not very much to say," she murmurs, tilting forward, resting her forehead against his jaw in a way that's got to be uncomfortable for her but that eases some of the ache that still lingers deep in his chest. "Ryan and Espo were stuck with us for a while the hospital – and now on this unofficial protective duty – and have barely been able to get back to the scene to canvass witnesses."

"And they're the only cops to work it?" he asks skeptically.

He feels her shrug. "The 17th has it, but it's been a tangled mess from the get-go over there. They sent a couple cops around, but Ryan's convinced the statements they got were halfassed at best. Gates is on the warpath about it, but there's only so much she can do when it's not her house."

"And the FBI?"

"They're working the forensics of it - left the canvassing to the 17th. They've been trying to track purchase of the nitrocellulose for the past day and a half, but so far they don't have anything remotely conclusive."

He breathes through it, tries not to concentrate on all the ways they're both utterly in the dark. "And the cop who tried to strangle me?" He shakes the name free of the cobwebs in his mind. "Lapinski?"

"Nothing," she growls. He can tell by the pause in her breathing that she's poised to say more, but he doesn't want her dwelling on that. Anger and frustration and helplessness are flowing thicker and thicker through her tone, her body once again growing rigid against him, and he realizes he has to stop, he has to stop now, before she shoves herself out of bed and runs out for a strategy session with Ryan in the living room.

"Okay," he murmurs, tilting his head down, exhaling gently against her cheekbone. "But we're still here." He nudges his nose into her temple, then down past her jaw, rests his lips against her pulse point and lets the light but steady thrum of her heartbeat ease the tension in his muscles.

Her throat vibrates with a laugh, a broken and bitter thing. He twists his arm awkwardly between them, slips his palm underneath her shirt, splays his fingers over the soft warmth of her abdomen, feels the muscles ripple lightly under his skin.

"We're still here," he murmurs again into her pulse, feeling her breathe into it this time, feeling her draw back just enough to tilt her chin so that their lips are aligned, so that they're drawing in breaths from each other's mouths.

"Yes," she says, and in that syllable he hears it all, _I'm so worried about you_ and _Are you sure you're okay? _and _Please just let me feel like I can rest. _

"I've been having – I've been having these dreams," he says.

"Dreams," she echoes.

"About another – a different universe."

"Castle," she whispers against his lips.

Her breathless anxiety brings him up short. "I'm not crazy," he says, but it sounds flimsy even to him.

"What do you mean another universe?" she murmurs throatily, a world of worry in the rasp of her voice.

The words spill out of him, disjointed and awkward. "I woke up married to Meredith. I'm not entirely sure why. You and I didn't – well, we barely know each other, at any rate. But I found you. At the 12th. The bomb went off there, too."

"We - what?"

And now the worry has an edge of hurt to it, a wounded ache that he can't understand and then suddenly understands all too well. "Not like that. It's not really like a dream. Not like a manifestation of some oddly repressed desire."

"Okay," she says with a lilting ache that lets him know it's anything but. He realizes with a jolt that in any universe, the truth about what's happening to him will hurt her.

"It's just –" he starts, but he can't say _nothing_, not with the sharp and caustic edge of a different kind of Beckett pressing so firmly against this reality.

"You're right," she murmurs into his mouth, her lips moving lightly against his, because even after all that, she still hasn't drawn away from him. "We're still here." But it sounds more desperate than hopeful, more broken than encouraging.

There are no words he can offer her to make it better. "Sleep," he whispers, letting his hand drift in slow circles along her abdomen, his fingers brushing against the waistband of her jeans.

She sighs, a sound more comforted than aroused. "Need to go check in with Ryan and Espo," she murmurs.

"Stay. I need you," he says, knowing that the moment when she walked into his hospital room and found his unconscious body being strangled will still be etched into her memory.

"Manipulator," she huffs.

He shrugs lightly. "Little bit."

She starts to tug herself away from him, but her movements are sluggish, reluctant.

"Still the truth, though," he murmurs, feels the reward of her body melting back against him with those words.

"Just for a minute," she rumbles, her voice already husky with sleep. He can feel her eyelashes fluttering against his cheek, her desperate fight to keep herself awake.

"Okay," he capitulates, ready to agree to anything, to do anything, if only she'll just _stay_.

She mumbles something unintelligible against his mouth as her breathing deepens and slows and she spirals into sleep. He lies completely still, afraid that too deep a breath could jolt her back to consciousness, and contents himself with the angle of her nose pressed sharply against his, the soft and steady pressure of her lips at the corner of his mouth. He wants only to feel the sleeping warmth of her against him for hours, for days, wants only to keep her in this bed until the broken edge to her voice abates, but the steady quiet of her breathing lulls him slowly toward the light.

* * *

"This is getting old, Castle," he hears as the blur of light and color coalesces into sharp lines and shapes. She's staring down at him, her face slightly too pale, her jaw clenched.

"Am I lying in your bed, Beckett?"

She blinks. "It was that or let you hit the floor."

"Instead I hit your _bed_," he says, letting himself leer a little.

He's rewarded with a zealous glare. "Well, if you stopped swooning we could stay out of these awkward situations."

"What would ever make you think that I'd want to stop anything that would get me in your bed? And I do not _swoon,_" he says, pushing up onto his elbows and then gingerly sitting.

He's immediately confronted with a web of index cards and pictures, the awful tapestry of her mother's murder, the first thing she wakes to every morning. "I like what you've done with the place," he says mildly.

"You had no business coming in here," she growls, all traces of lightness suddenly vanished. His eyes flick between her anxious, angry stare and the morbid wall.

"You're right," he says, because if there's one thing Beckett appreciates, it's a genuine admission of a transgression. "But I did."

"It's just a - case," she says, shaking her head self-deprecatingly, seemingly realizing how ridiculous she sounds halfway through the sentence.

"I know what this is," he says quietly.

Her eyes jerk over to the board, and he can see her gaze flicking over the picture of her mother's body, can see her scan the index card next to it, the bold and unwavering letters of Johanna Beckett's name, like she doesn't already know it all by heart. "Right. Of course."

"Your mother," he says needlessly. He wants to let it spill out of him, unravel into the soft light of the room, the mugging gone wrong in that alley and the looming and unwavering presence of Bracken and the quiet drowning look in her eyes. Everything.

"Yup," she gets out, her eyes fixed on the wall, the line of her shoulders raised and tense. A ripple of motion draws his gaze down, her fingers clenching and unclenching, and he realizes with a sudden start that her hand is covered in blood.

"You're bleeding," he says inanely.

She drags her eyes away from the wall, glances down at the still-seeping wound, pivots abruptly and walks toward the bathroom.

"Do you need –" he starts to ask.

"No," she calls out, not bothering to turn back around. "Just – I'll meet you in the living room."

He hums an unintelligible response as he studies the wall. She's made it further than he ever would have hoped, Pugliatti and McAllister and Raglan and some less-than-nebulous conceptions of corruption and bribery, but the holes are noticeable – no mention of Coonan, no threads to Montgomery, not a whisper of the Senator.

He fights the sudden urge that pulses through his blood to rip it down, to carry the cards and the pictures over to that gorgeously protective clawfoot tub of hers and light a match and watch it all go up in flames. He knows the facts are inscribed into her being by now, knows it wouldn't make a difference except to sever himself from this version of Beckett irreparably, but it almost doesn't matter. It almost –

"This isn't the living room, Castle," she says, stepping out of the bathroom and abruptly jolting him out of his mental tailspin.

He sucks in a breath, tries to shake it off. "I'm easily confused." He wonders what set her off. A glance through a file and a notice of the altered papers. A lucky spurt of research into similar murders in that time period. A phone call from a guilt-ridden Raglan.

She had been wrapping a bandage steadily around her hand, but she stills, suddenly, the roll of gauze half unraveled, doing absolutely nothing to stem the flow of blood. "I know it looks bad," she says softly.

He blinks, swallows back all the questions and recriminations that knot in his throat, tries to wait for her to speak.

"I know it looks really bad," she continues. "But I'm going to –" she swallows thickly, and he suddenly sees what he's somehow missed beneath her protective veneer of anger, sees the sheen of tears she'll never shed in front of him. "I'm going to ask for your discretion."

"My discretion," he echoes idiotically, but he can't even begin to think of what she might mean.

He can actually see her biting it all back, can feel the palpable change in her as she claws her way back from the edge of tears. "It's probably pretty decent pulp for your fiction. But if people knew –"

And this time he can't quite stop himself. "Christ, Beckett, forget about my fiction for a minute. How do you _live _like this?" How could she possibly survive, waking up every day to the image of her blood-soaked mother lying dead in an alley?

She shrugs, works through it for a moment. "I don't bring a lot of guys home," she finally says.

If he thought for even a heartbeat that she'd tolerate it, he'd grab her and drag her into his arms, but as it is, all he can do is stand up, step over to her, shuffle so closely into her space that all that separates them is a breath of air. Her hand that's been rolling the gauze is still suspended, her knuckles white with the strength of her grip, and now that he's closer he can see the fine tremble running through her fingers. She's done an atrocious job bandaging because of it, the wrap an uneven mess that can't be comfortable. He won't stop himself from taking the chance, gently pulling the roll from her grip, unraveling the material slowly from around her wounded hand.

He doesn't know why she accepts it, but she lets him, she lets him stay too close to her, lets him unwind the gauze from around her hand, lets him inspect the deep and clean slice into her skin, lets him gently wind the gauze back around until the bandage is fixed and even. He can sense the tension in her as she stands there, drawing breaths that are still slightly shaky, but he won't look up at her face until the job is finished, won't let anything distract him from the one small wound that he can actually do something about.

When he's finally done, when he finally lifts his gaze to her eyes, he finds a quiet kind of sadness there that overlies a longing so latent, so deeply buried, he's not even sure she knows it's there. It's different than anything he'd expected, the bristling anger or the utter despondency, and he's powerless to do anything but absorb it, to try and memorize every refraction of light off the darkness of her pupils.

Her eyelids lower in a long and slow blink that is so close to an admission, so close to the inexorable sway of her body into his. When her lashes part and he sees the moisture at the edges of them it's enough to drive his hand up, to send his thumb skimming along the edge of her jaw.

"Kate," he rasps, feeling the softness of her skin over the jut of her bone, feeling the steady core of strength beneath her faintly trembling body.

She's frozen for another heartbeat, and then she jolts away abruptly, spinning on her heel and stalking out of the bedroom, leaving him to follow like she somehow already knows he has no choice.

* * *

They're almost back at the 12th before he dredges up the courage to speak. Since she stalked away from him in her bedroom, she's seemed edgy, barely controlled, her body vibrating with a brittle kind of tension that makes Castle unwilling to do anything other than sit back and quietly observe her.

Her wall served as a sharp reminder to him. He knows the light that sometimes flickers through her eyes, he knows the teasing, sarcastic lilt that sometimes threads through her tone, but he doesn't know this version of Beckett. He can't predict what she might do, can't understand the decisions she might make, can't be sure that she won't immediately arrest him at the slightest provocation.

But there's also only so long he can sit in silence and wait until she either steadies or explodes.

"We should canvass that neighborhood. See if there were any witnesses," he murmurs into the tense silence. Somewhere in the back of his consciousness, he still hears Beckett's whispered conversation in the darkness. In that other world, he might be powerless in the face of this irreparable mess of a case, but here, in this world where they are both more whole in all the unimportant ways, this is something they can tackle.

She huffs a brusque laugh, replies in a voice that's only a little bit raw. "The 17th's handling it, but Ryan and Esposito haven't left since the bomb went off."

"Really?" he murmurs inanely, trying to fill the empty space with anything inoffensive.

Her gaze flicks over to him. "They wouldn't be doing anything else."

_Except making sure my blind ass doesn't get us both killed_, he wants to say, but he's pretty sure that would be a surefire way to cause their already-stagnated conversation to flounder and die. "Right," he mumbles, sounding like the world's biggest moron, and then the silence hangs heavy in the air again.

"I'm not unstable," she says, her abrupt words making his head snap over to her. Her fingers are wrapped tightly around the steering wheel.

"I know you're not unstable," he responds reflexively.

"Then why are you suddenly walking on eggshells here?"

He opens his mouth, shuts it, struggles for any kind of response that won't push her further away.

"Not that I know why I'm bothering to justify myself to _you_," she's muttering under her breath, just loudly enough that he can hear.

"You're – passionate," he says, charitably deciding to ignore her quiet insult. "You don't back down."

It used to be the thing that impressed him the most about her, her crackling, perpetual drive to find answers. Now – now he still wakes up with it choking him, sometimes, a brutal fist of fear around his throat.

She says nothing, just shakes her head slowly, her stare fixed on the road, her meaning unmistakable – _You don't know me._

_I do know you_, he thinks at her, his gaze tracing the clenched muscles of her forearms, the defiant glint of her eyes, but then she's turning into the garage and pulling into a space and cutting off the engine.

"Later," she says, in a tone that carries the promise of a tense truce.

She doesn't give him a chance to respond before she's stepping up into the garage. A man steps out of his squad car and walks over to her, a uniform who's all cropped hair and bulging muscles. "Hey, Beckett," he says, nodding sharply at her as he falls into step beside her. Castle hops out of the car, walking double time to catch up.

"They got you tailing us at the precinct, too?" she asks. Castle can just see the edge of her smile, and he tries to tamp down on the surge of jealousy that coils low in his stomach. If only the man's biceps were just an inch smaller.

"Can't be too careful," the uniform says, his quiet voice so at odds with his bulky stature. Something about him makes Castle's hair stand straight on end, his hackles rise. He wishes the man weren't walking quite so close to Beckett.

"Well, don't feel like you have to stick to us here. I'm sure Lafayette wants you back on the eighth floor ASAP."

"Don't worry about it. You got any leads?" They're just stepping up to the elevator, the man stopping several inches too close to her. Castle breathes through the jealousy, the prickling anger and unease that surges deep in his stomach, that washes up the back of his neck.

"None to speak of," she murmurs.

He smiles down at her. "Well, it hasn't been that long. In the meantime, you just need to be careful."

Beckett hums an affirmative, but Castle's mind sticks on the last two words, _be careful be careful be careful _pinging through his brain, jolting an erratic rhythm through his skull.

The memory crashes through him suddenly, unmistakably: _Be careful who you cross, Mr. Castle,_ and then the sudden steady pressure on his throat.

He rocks back on his heels with it, clenches his fists into keep from reaching out and wrapping his hand around her wrist and dragging her away. His heart thuds hard against his sternum, a desperate rhythm that he has no hope of steadying.

The elevator pings, opens to an empty car, and Lapinski steps halfway inside, keeping the door open for them. Castle isn't sure of much in this world, but he's positive that there's no way in hell Beckett is getting onto the elevator with the man who tried to strangle him.

"I forgot my jacket," he says to her, his voice coming out surprisingly steady. "In your car."

"You weren't wearing a jacket," she responds, tilting her head at him.

He takes the space of half a heartbeat to silently curse her always-alert powers of observation, then presses on, staring into her eyes, willing her with the strength of any bond they ever might have shared to _trust _him. "I was. I was, and I left it in your car."

"Oh," she says, blinking, clearly not understanding but ready to try for him, to play along. He feels a surge of affection so strong that for a moment it overrides even the panic pulsing through his blood. "Here." She holds out her keys, nudges them through the air toward his palm.

Fuck.

He stares at her hand like an idiot, frozen stupidly, and now she's watching him even more closely, probably worried he's fast stampeding toward the cliff of some type of psychotic break. He very resolutely does not look at Lapinski.

"You trust me with your keys?" he asks, trying a little too hard to keep his voice casual. She picks up on it: he can tell by the slight tension in her shoulders, the worried, assessing quality of her gaze, but he doesn't feel a change in Lapinski's energy, in the solid bulk of the man still standing close, far too close, to Beckett.

"Good point," she says, then sighs in a way that's a little too loud to be anything but an act. "Mind holding that for us?" she asks the guard, tilting her chin at the elevator. Castle doesn't know whether she's suddenly totally in tune with him or whether it's just a freak stroke of luck, but either way he wants nothing more than to drag her up against his body and kiss her breathless. "We'll only be a second."

"No problem, Beckett."

They walk toward the car in total silence. He can feel the tension and confusion rolling off her in waves. "Get in," he hisses when she reaches the front of the hood and stops, clearly waiting for him to retrieve whatever nonexistent jacket he's been babbling about.

"Castle," she murmurs reproachfully, watching him with a dark and wary kind of suspicion.

"Get in the car and drive right now," he growls low in his throat.

She blinks. "Absolutely not," she starts. He can tell she's gathering herself to begin some sort of tirade, or worse, to turn around and stalk back to the elevator, and they don't have _time_.

His breath is coming short and fast, making the edges of his vision spin in in a loose grey tunnel. "You need to trust me," he grits out, praying for there to be some deep part of her that recognizes him, that believes in him enough to do what he is begging her to do. "Just for a second. I knew about the bomb. I know about this. We need to get in that car and we need to drive out of here and we need to do it now."

"Is anyone here in danger?" she asks, even more on edge now, her stance nowhere near softening,

"Only us," he chokes out. She eyes him skeptically. "I swear. Only us."

"Castle," she sighs.

"Please," he attempts, the syllable strangled in his throat.

She doesn't respond in words, just opens the door, slides into the driver's seat. He flings himself down into the car, panic still thudding through him, making darkness swirl at the edges of his vision. "I don't know what you want," she growls, gesturing sharply at the steering wheel, an angry kind of hopelessness turning her voice ragged.

"We need to," he starts, but the words are evading him, slipping through his brain too quickly to hold. He can barely coordinate his muscles to reach into his pocket, pull out his phone, find what he needs in his recent destinations. "This," he slurs.

The engine rumbles gorgeously to life, and he thinks, though the black spots are ever expanding, that he can see Lapinski starting to move towards them from the elevator.

"Faster," Castle says, and then there is nothing.

* * *

Thanks to everyone who's been reading and reviewing! If you've been chugging merrily (maybe merrily is not the right word for this fic - perplexedly? quixotically? warily?) along with and have had the unlikely thought, "You know, this is fine and all, but I could really use some more: 1. Beckett POV. 2. Sex," then you may be in luck, and you can keep a look out for chapter 10.5 (which would be posted separately, because both of the two aforementioned things have no place in this twisted-enough-already story) at some point in the future. Wow, that was really hopelessly vague (clearly I am good at that!), but how about we just say that if posting occurs I'll stick an announcement in chapter 11? Yes. Let's say that.


	11. Chapter 11

He startles badly, his eyes searching frantically for a light that will not appear. A warm weight anchors him, pins him to the bed, comforts him through his too-fast jolt back to consciousness. His arms move unconsciously, his palms smoothing down her sides and then up under the fabric of her shirt, dragging slowly over the soft warmth of her back. She's curled onto him, the firm pressure of her plaster cast and the rough scratch of her bandage resting against his shoulder, the bulky cloth over her cracked ribs pressing awkwardly at the middle of his sternum. Even now her muscles are tense, contracted and braced against him. He presses his hands more firmly into her back, slows his breathing, tries to willfully hold her in sleep.

She mumbles something incoherent, her mouth open at his throat, the warmth of her breath heating his jugular. Then, suddenly, the murmur of his name, the jolt of her elbows into his ribs, the crack of her knees against his thighs.

"Hey, hey, you're okay," he murmurs as she lets out a nearly inaudible moan that clenches at his throat.

She starts to tear away from him, but he holds tighter, flexes his biceps hard against her brief struggle, releases the pressure only when she melts back down into his body. "Sorry," she whispers into his neck, her voice rough.

"We've got to get you to stop apologizing, Beckett."

She huffs against him, her nose nudging into his throat. "You sleep?"

"A little," he hums noncommittally.

"You dream?"

He freezes, all that carefully constructed looseness in his body dissolving into tension. "A little," he hedges.

"What about?" Her tone is too precisely monitored, too much of the controlled and coaxing edge that she wields so adeptly against suspects.

He flexes his fingers, lets them dig a little too firmly into the hard plane of her back. "I don't know, Beckett. What'd you dream about?"

She draws back again, the damp heat of her mouth abandoning his throat, the warmth of her torso drifting away to leave him cold.

"That wasn't fair of me," he whispers into the void left by her silence.

"Probably not," he hears. She's halfway on him, her body pressing back against the light pressure of his palms. It takes everything in him not to clutch at her too tightly, everything in him to believe that she won't stand up and walk away and leave him unable to find her. He breathes through it, waits until he feels her draw in a deep inhale that feels more relaxed, then makes himself let go.

She shifts off him and slightly away, but she doesn't leave. She doesn't leave.

He rolls to face her, twists onto his side and shifts in the bed until he can feel the slight warmth of her breath across the bridge of his nose. "I don't like feeling like you're handling me," he says candidly. Reaching over, he runs his index finger over the jut of her hipbone, feels the thrum of her body as she turns his words over in her mind.

"I'm not _handling _you," she finally says. He can't quite stop the skeptical huff of air that escapes from his mouth. Her hand strokes up his forearm, her fingernails scraping lightly, sending a ripple up his bicep, through his chest and abs. "I'm worried about you," she finally whispers.

"Yeah. Ditto."

"Neurologically," she murmurs.

He can't stop the brief smile that flares across his face. "What else is new, Beckett?"

He can't tell if the noise that escapes her is a strangled laugh or a suppressed sob. "Still too soon, Castle."

He shifts his hand off her hip, finds her nose with his index finger and slowly skids over the slope of it. "Just checking."

She's silent for too long. "I'm going to get you back to a hospital as soon as we know it's safe."

The questions bubble in his throat, stagger into one another and slowly die. He doesn't care if he has to go to another hospital, he doesn't care where is actually safe, he doesn't even care if she thinks he's having his own neurological Chernobyl disaster. Just so long as she stays with him.

* * *

He's not sure how long he floats in a dark sea of half-awareness, his index finger under the sharp ridge of her cheekbone, his palm resting heavily on the concave warmth of her side. She's sunk back into an uneasy sleep, the occasional discontented murmur echoing in the back of her throat, sudden twitches sometimes rippling through her body. It's enough to keep him mostly with her, though several times he catches himself drifting toward that other world - the low rumble of a car beneath his thighs and the murmur of her voice asking quiet, commanding questions.

A tap on the door drags him all the way to consciousness. "Hey, Beckett. Castle. You guys awake?" Ryan's soft whisper echoes through the room.

He feels her body jerk sharply beneath his palms. "Yeah. What's up, Ryan?" she calls, her voice coming out steady, more alert than he'd have thought possible.

"Can you come out here?" he asks. "We have a guest."

Anxiety roils in his stomach. "Sure thing," Beckett's calling, and then suddenly there is only the absence of her body, the presence of the darkness that seems so much more suffocating when she's not touching him.

He sits slowly, swings his legs over the side of the bed and fights the vertigo, and then she's there, a huff of air on his forehead, a warm hand smoothing down his bicep. "You okay?" she roughs out. Now that she's not talking to Ryan he can hear the exhaustion and the pain threaded through her voice.

"Ready for anything," he responds, a little too chipper.

He hears her sigh in response as he stands, steadier now than he was before. She stops him with a hand on his shoulder, a sharp squeeze that anchors him upright. "Ryan brought some clothes for you," she murmurs, and he feels the rasp of denim against his the back of his hand. He doesn't need any help to change, but she hovers close, her knuckles skittering over his stomach when she adjusts his shirt, her fingers brushing along his hip as she traces over the waistband of his jeans.

"Presentable?" he asks, smirking, as she finally stands and smooths his shirt, her right hand still trailing absently along his side.

"Hardly," she murmurs, her voice throaty in his ear.

He swallows, can't help the gravitation of his body into hers, can't help the wander of his hand to the clenched muscles of her neck, can't help the press of his mouth against her forehead. "You're so tense," he whispers, his lips skating over her skin.

A sharp puff of air busts across his throat. "Amazing what a car bomb and your getting strangled does to my need for some muscle relaxers."

"Kate," he tries, but all he can do is keep his hand moving carefully along her neck.

"We have a guest," she reminds him, stepping abruptly away.

He stays silent as she cups his elbow, silent as they shuffle slowly over the cold wooden floor, silent as she pulls him back to a halt.

"Detective Beckett. Mr. Castle," he hears, the sharp and commanding tone of Gates' voice.

"Captain," they chorus.

"Have a seat," Gates says in a voice that brooks no room for argument.

"I – okay," Beckett responds, managing to inject as much _What the hell are you doing here_ as possible into those three syllables. "Hi Ryan. Lanie. Espo." She sounds awkward and stilted, like she's calling roll, and Castle suddenly realizes she's doing it for him, letting him know who's in the room. She tightens her fingers and tugs down firmly on his elbow; he obeys, lowering himself carefully onto a soft cushion.

He idly wonders why Esposito's not guarding the door.

"How are you both feeling?" Gates asks, a note of genuine care beneath her usual perfunctory tone.

"Fine, Sir," Beckett says.

He can practically feelGates' skeptical look, but the woman doesn't comment. "Good," she says, barely letting a brief and awkward pause hang in the air before plowing on. "It was a random terrorist attack," she says.

"It wasn't a random terrorist attack," Castle responds reflexively. There's no way.

"It was," Gates says. "Abdul Rahman. We have several witness statements who can corroborate his placement of the car bomb."

"Really? We're pinning it on the guy with the Arabic name?"

"Mr. Castle," Gates snaps, and he can feel Beckett's knee press hard into him, the ridge of her patella digging into his thigh.

"How'd they figure it was random?" Beckett asks. He can hear the skepticism soaking her tone, knows she's with him on this.

"He came over from Iraq a week ago. They found a substantial quantity of diazodinitrophenol in his apartment, though they're still not entirely clear how he acquired it. He's down at the 17th while they duke out custody with the FBI, but everyone's confident with the evidence. So far, they've found no motive – no hint of ties to this case or to the NYPD."

Beckett's knee still rests lightly against him, letting him feel the tense current thrumming through her body. "And Lapinski? How does this new evidence fit in with the attempt on Castle's life?"

"They brought him in an hour ago," Gates says. "Found him uptown at his apartment. It's too early to tell for sure, but it appears he was in the midst of a psychotic break. He served in the First Gulf War and has apparently had undiagnosed PTSD for some time now, according to his team."

"Undiagnosed PTSD?" Beckett asks, barely keeping the disgust out of her voice. "The kind that out of the blue makes him walk into a sightless man's hospital room, attempt to strangle him to death, and then plow down an armed detective in his escape attempt?"

"Apparently," Gates says. "Regardless, he is no longer a threat to either of you."

"And… what? That's that?" Castle asks.

"That's that, Mr. Castle," Gates says, her tone brooking no argument.

"Captain," Beckett breathes.

"Look. I know how personally this case has affected both of you, and if you think I'm indifferent to the fact that one of my people had a bomb detonate in her squad card, you're sorely mistaken. I'll be the first to admit, I was skeptical of the way the 17th was handling this, but they've gotten results. Everyone there has been putting in the extra work – even the Chief of Detectives has been a presence."

Beckett makes a low, dissenting noise in the back of her throat. He wishes he could take her hand, settles for pressing back against her knee with his thigh, a sharp, firm point of contact. "I'd like to be there for the interrogations. Both of them."

"Absolutely not."

"Captain –"

"Detective, I happen to be entirely cognizant of the fact that you checked yourself out of the hospital AMA. And even if you were feeling entirely healthy, I know you're well aware of my stance on my people working cases in which they were victims."

When Beckett speaks again, her voice is tired, quiet. "Yes, sir."

"You won't be setting foot back in the precinct without proper medical clearance." Gates pauses for a beat. "Both of you," she adds, which is somewhat generous, Castle thinks, considering the chances that he won't be setting foot in the precinct unless he's trailing behind an overenthusiastic guide dog.

"The Cullen case?" Beckett murmurs, her voice small in the utterly silent room.

"Considering our decrease in manpower and the sudden increase in their familiarity with the case, the 17th's offered to take this one on."

"Captain," a chorus of three voices sound in various stages of dissent, Ryan and Esposito finally joining the conversation.

"We're not so overworked right –" Esposito starts, but Gates cuts him off.

"It's already been decided," she says. "Detectives Ryan and Esposito, take the rest of the day. Detective Beckett. Mr. Castle. Go home. Or back to the hospital. You don't need to worry about your safety anymore."

He hears the sharp clack of footfalls, Ryan's murmured "Thank you, sir," and then there is only a silent and suffocating darkness.

"Is anybody any kind of okay with this?" Esposito finally growls.

The room stays hushed. He can picture the looks they're exchanging: Beckett and Esposito's dark anger at having so many cases suddenly utterly out of their control, Ryan's quieter consternation, Lanie's concern.

"What's next?" Ryan asks.

He feels Beckett sigh beside him, and he can't help, now that Gates is gone, reaching out to her and resting his palm flat against her thigh, feeling the life and warmth of her body seep up into his palm. "Exactly," she says, her words rushing suddenly away from him.

This time he doesn't even fight the fall back toward the light.

* * *

"You, too," he hears, a low murmur, then silence.

There's the rumble of an engine beneath him, the press of his body outward as the car rounds a curve, the rush of dry air over his neck from the vents.

He pushes up from his slump, blinks out the windshield. They're driving briskly along a highway that's utterly dark, no ambient glow from the city, no glare of streetlights.

Beckett's gaze is fixed out the windshield, her fingers wrapped lightly around the steering wheel. "You're awake," she says, not even giving him a glance.

"Yeah," he says, alert but awkward. "I – yeah. Sorry."

"Sure." He can't tell if she's being sarcastic or just coolly accepting his apology.

And then they're driving in silence again, so many questions crowding his brain that he's not sure what to ask first. He's fairly certain she wouldn't deign to answer any of them at any rate.

She finally sighs. "Ryan's nearly certain there were eyes on Jeff Yost's house before the bomb went off."

He pauses, digests that information. "So if people were watching our potential witness –"

"Yeah. It would be related to the Cullen case." She briefly draws her teeth over her lip. "Hard to be entirely certain, though. We've been experiencing some odd friction with the 17th – guy in charge seems like he's in a pissing contest with both the 12th and the FBI."

Something lurches in his stomach, the urgent desire to lull himself back to sleep, but awareness is sparkling through him. He cracks his window, breathes in, feels the vital sharpness of the night air swirl into the car as he tries to think of any kind of response.

His window rises abruptly. "It's cold in here."

He decides that at this point, another apology would be redundant. "You're annoyed with me," he observes, mostly because if he says _You look like you wouldn't mind taking out your gun and shooting me someplace nonlethal _he's afraid it would put the idea into her head.

She breathes out. "Astute."

"I know. I'd make a great cop, right?"

"Yeah. Directing traffic."

"Ouch, Beckett," he says, then pauses for a beat. "Speaking of traffic."

"We're going there," she growls.

He almost asks where _there _is, but he suddenly remembers dragging up his address and shoving his phone at her just before lapsing into darkness. "We are?" he asks, surprise forcing the question out his throat.

"Just shut up," she grits out, and even though she's angry – with him, obviously, but also with herself, he thinks – even though she's so angry, she keeps driving north on the quiet, tree-lined highway.

He wants to think that it's the strength of their connection, transcending universes, bridging space and time, but there's a deep and unwavering part of him that knows the truth. His Beckett might listen to his theories, but she would never drive north because a man rapidly becoming unconscious had thrust an address at her. His Beckett might pin up a makeshift murder board behind her shutters, but she would never tack pictures of her dead mother to the wall opposite her bed. This Beckett is a dangerous kind of reckless, less measured, less in control.

"You gonna explain why we took off like that?" she finally asks.

He swallows, weighs the possibility that Lapinski was actually in the midst of a random episode of PTSD when he wandered into his hospital room, but – no. The cold and deliberate way the man spoke to him, the professional feeling of the cop's fingers on his throat, the calculated speed of his escape. "Lapinski," he says, swallowing around the name. "I don't think he's a good guy."

Her whole body flickers with tension, her biceps flexing, her fingers clenching tight around the wheel. "What do you mean?" she asks, her voice low, almost threatening.

"Did you tell him where we were going?" Castle asks, a sudden panic flashing through his chest. "Because I don't know if –"

"Castle," she bites out, a jagged warning.

He forces himself to take a deep breath, lets his eyes close briefly, allows himself to revel in the suddenly-comforting darkness as he searches for any answer that she'll accept. He comes up with absolutely nothing. "You're - going to have to trust me," he says. He has nothing else.

"No," she says immediately. "How could you expect that I would trust you on this for one _second_?"

"I…" he starts, then lets it sputter and die.

"I've known Lapinski for _years_," she hisses. "And what the _hell_ do I know about you?"

And still, still he can't stop it. "Just – you didn't – did you tell him where we were going?"

He risks a glance at her, sees her eyes glinting with an anger that makes him wish he'd paid attention instead of just ogled when his Beckett tried to teach him advanced self defense. "No," she finally grits out. "I called Montgomery and told him I was taking the day, although I'm sure that if Lapinski wanted to find us it wouldn't be overly difficult for him, given that _he is a cop_."

That, of course, does nothing to calm the fear that fizzles through his bloodstream, and he thinks, from the dangerous glare she shoots him, that she can tell how worried he is.

"We better have a _damn_ good reason for going up here," she growls.

For a moment his mind draws another horrifying blank and he can't imagine why he'd ever asked her to bring them, can't imagine anything outside the reality of her vibrant anger, the whiteness of her knuckles and the rigid clench of her jaw.

She shakes her head once, a sharp jerk that cuts off whatever answer he was going to give. "Never mind," she snaps. He hears her unspoken _I should have arrested you when I had the chance._

They drive on in a tense silence. They don't speak again until they're pulling up outside the stark lines of the gleaming Greenwich mansion. He tries to tumble through the case in his mind, rearranging the jagged pieces into a whole, but the information won't stop dissolving into the contours of his Beckett – the bulk of the cast he hasn't seen, the darkness of the exhaustion he can only sense.

"This is your house," she says as the car rolls to a stop, her voice a little flat, and he comes back to himself to see her taking it in, her gaze tracing the angle of the roof, her eyes flicking over the columns that line the wraparound porch.

"Such as it is," he hedges, stepping out of the car and getting halfway to the front door before he realizes she's not following. "Coming, Beckett?" he asks, and he only has to force some of the lightness into his tone.

"I'll just - be here," she says, her words barely audible through the closed door, but she's damn right that Lapinski or anyone else could find them all too easily. Like hell he's leaving her sitting here in the driveway all alone.

He steps back toward the car, tries on a smile. "Seriously, Beckett, who knows what trouble I could get into in there?"

"You telling me you're gonna make another bomb?" she asks as she steps out of the car.

He grins brightly. "I didn't realize we were at the joking about it stage," he says as they walk toward the house.

"We are absolutely not at the joking about anything stage."

He fumbles awkwardly with the keys, feeling her eyes on him as he fiddles with the silver one that he could have _sworn _was right until it refuses to even budge the tumbler. He pulls the keys away too quickly, wincing as they clatter to the tile of the portico.

A sharp sigh cuts through the air as he crouches to snag the keys, and he tenses, bracing for her _Seriously, Castle, is it really possible for you to screw up every single thing you touch?_

"Seriously, Castle," she starts. "Are you sure you're okay?"

He rises slowly with the keys, blinks at her, finds that even though she's several feet away from him, he can feel that old current sparking electrically between them. The one that's unmistakable, the _I haven't seen you naked but there's nothing I wouldn't try to get the chance, _the one that's different - quieter and deeper and more a drenching tide than an electric connection - with his Beckett. "Uh. Yeah."

"There's not - you don't have a doctor you should be seeing?" she presses, her teeth sliding so briefly over her lower lip, making his breath catch in his chest.

He tries to grin at her, tries not to let her see how her every twitch affects him. "What kind of doctor you talking about here, Beckett?"

The clouds of worry drift away from her irises as she levels him with a glare. "It's not all that funny."

He sighs, starts flipping through the key ring again. "Being stuck with a guy who can't even find his own front door key?"

"Among other things," she says as he discovers a smaller silver key and shoves it into the lock.

The tumbler turns. He grins triumphantly. "See? I always come through when it counts."

"I prefer someone who gets it right on the first try," she murmurs distractedly, her eyes flicking around the portico. He drags in a deep breath of the cool night air, squares his shoulders, and pushes the door open.


	12. Chapter 12

The dog bounds from the darkened entryway directly into Castle's legs, making him stagger sideways. Beckett reaches over, wrapping firm fingers around his elbow to keep him steady as the retriever bounces past them into the grass.

"Thanks," he murmurs, which of course makes her drop his arm like he's burnt her. He ignores the brief sting of hurt, turning halfway toward the front yard. "Don't run away, Gus!" he calls, needlessly, since the Golden Retriever seems content to wander the darkness near the house.

"Gus?" she hums reproachfully as the dog trots back toward them.

"I know, right? No accounting for taste."

He ignores whatever look he's sure she's giving him, instead walking into the house, hearing the jingle of the tags on the dog's collar and the clacking of her heels right behind him. He flicks on several switches that set the entryway and kitchen and living room ablaze with light, takes a second to orient himself in the unfamiliar space and breadth of it all.

When he turns back around, her gaze is tracing the balustrades that support the handrail of the wide staircase, her body slightly bent to allow her hand to ruffle absently along the fur of dog's neck. Gus is gazing up at her with unmuffled adoration, clearly understanding a good thing when he sees it.

She must catch him staring: her spine snaps suddenly straight and the dog levels Castle with a mournful stare that makes it clear he perfectly understands who's to blame for the sudden lack of attention. "So," Beckett says, lifting an eyebrow.

He bobs his head. "Can I get you anything?" he asks. His words fall flat into the awkward silence.

"No," she replies after a beat.

They seem to have reached an impasse, standing in the middle of the living room, staring at each other while the dog nudges his nose gently against the back of Beckett's knee. He's busy reveling in all the differences: in the sight of the tired and pale lines of her face, the sharp spike of her hair, the dark suspicion in her eyes, when he's swamped with a drowning kind of desire. Suddenly he wants nothing more than to be staring at different version of Beckett: the soft waves of her hair, the ready quirk of her lips into a full-blown smile, the spark that ignites in her eyes when she sees him.

She finally seems to understand that he would happily spend eternity locked in a staring contest with her, because she sighs, giving in. "So. Why exactly are we here, Castle?"

He shifts his weight from his heels to his toes, then rolls back a bit, realizes he's somehow rocking under her gaze and snaps his body still. He can't entirely remember what possessed him – some vague desire to get them out of the city, away from danger, he's sure, but even as he careened toward unconsciousness he must have realized how horribly easy it would be for anyone to track them.

"The. Uh. Vital to the case," he stutters, gesturing up the stairs vaguely with his wrist.

She's back to staring, one of her elegant eyebrows in her patent arch of death, so he shuts up, not sure what he's doing other than buying time. "Why'd you have us come here, Castle?" she asks again, her voice too amiable, too easily conversational to be anything but a trap.

He glances around the living room, his gaze bouncing off the stark, clean lines of the house, giving him absolutely nothing to work with.

"I want you to tell me right now that you didn't demand that I drive us to your house just before you passed out so that you could _check on your dog._"

And it sounds ridiculous, it sounds completely beyond ridiculous, but now that he's thinking about it he can't help but remember the moment he faded out, the odd and searing image of him and Beckett and his dog by the pool, and beneath that a thumping pulse of worry and responsibility.

Far be it for him to let down anyone else who's depending on him.

"Among – you know – other things," he mutters.

He's prepared for her to growl, to spin away, maybe even to slap him again. But instead her shoulders sag half an inch, her chin tilting slightly toward the ground, her fingers unclenching, her entire body deflating millimeter by millimeter.

He pauses, considers her form with a different kind of perspective that has him suddenly off balance. "You thought I'd have something here," he breathes. "Something that would – help with the case?"

She glances up at him, a quiet kind of self-deprecation behind the walls in her eyes. "No," she says, in a tone that means nothing but _yes._

He takes the gamble, shuffles a little closer to her, gives her a serious kind of smile. "Admit it, Beckett. My insights can be blindingly astute."

She shoots him a glare with absolutely no fight behind it, then breathes a capitulating sigh. "You've gotten lucky," she admits. "Not that I'm conceding anything about Lapinski."

"Of course not," he hums, still shifting with a desperate desire to be _useful _to her. "Maybe we could check the laptop?"

She stares at him silently.

"It's upstairs," he adds.

"What the hell is your laptop going to do for us?"

"Research," he murmurs, lets the thought trail off into silence.

She keeps staring.

"Or –" he starts, but the words melt again into the air between them. There's nothing here that will connect him to the case, no reason they should be here, no missing pieces that can help her.

They both startle when her phone beeps from her pocket. She stares up at him with a sudden look of calculation that he can't decipher. "Phone's dying, but I have a portable charger with me. Where's the nearest outlet?"

He glances around the foyer, but they're standing at an angle that doesn't have a great line of sight to the rest of the house. By the time he can murmur _the, um, the kitchen counter_ in a small voice, she's staring at him likes she's just wrangled a confession.

"I'd ask you if this is your house, but I had Esposito run the address on the way up, so I know it is."

"Makes sense," he mutters.

"So what is it, Castle? A degenerative disease? Neurological lapses?" She lets her eyes flick over his body. "What's giving you advanced knowledge of a bomb and making you forget where your outlets are and which key opens the front door?"

His shoulders lift up and fall in a helpless shrug. "What do you want me to say here, Beckett?"

"Oh. Right. The other universe," she says, enunciating each word just enough to convey her complete skepticism.

He signs, feels a dull and throbbing ache behind his eyes, reaches up and squeezes the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger. "Right," he says.

The clack of her heels on hardwood suddenly reverberates through the open space, and he turns to see her walking toward the kitchen, then hopping onto a bar stool, facing the fridge. He follows slowly, reluctant, feeling more wrung out than he has since he woke in the sun-soaked upstairs bedroom with Meredith after being blinded by a still-inexplicable bomb.

He reaches her side and stands next to her, but she doesn't take her gaze off the fridge, doesn't turn or acknowledge him in any way, just continues to sit there, her profile rigid, her face giving away absolutely nothing. She doesn't even call him out for staring with such an unwavering fixation.

"I believe you," she finally says, out of nowhere, her words flat and emotionless.

"You – do?"

She finally swivels toward him, blinks and tilts her chin up to meet his eyes. He wants to sit beside her, but he's too afraid that any movement will startle her admission right back into her mouth.

Her eyes focus on his forehead, nose, the contours of his mouth, and it's all he can do not to step into her, press his mouth against hers as he reaches down and tugs at the zipper on her pants.

"I believe that you believe," she concedes, meeting his eyes again.

He can't help but smile. "That's a pretty clear distinction," he says.

"When did it start?" she asks, so much gentler than she's ever been here.

"Recently," he hedges. "Really recently."

"And did you experience any trauma or major life changes in that same time period?"

It's almost worse than her not believing him at all. "You think I'm having a mental break because I got divorced from _Meredith_?"

She raises an eyebrow. "I wasn't the one to say it."

"Then how did I know about the bomb?"

She scrunches her nose, a move so fleeting and so like his Beckett that it makes his heart clench. "I'm still working on that."

He tries not to look too triumphant.

She reaches over, taps her index finger lightly against his hand. His whole body orients toward her when she pulls away. She's still sitting on that stool that puts her at a height disadvantage she'd never usually tolerate. "Why don't you start by answering that question for me?" she asks, her voice low and soothing and throaty.

Oh. He gets it. "You really do just need to ask, Beckett," he says, dropping to the stool beside her. _The vulnerable nonthreating act would only work if I were actually_ _trying to hide something._

She has the grace to look briefly away – though of course that could also be a calculated move – before glancing back up at him. "I'm asking."

"Where I'm – from," he stutters. "The Cullen case was the same, but we'd run through some different details and pulled up outside Jeff Yost's apartment a couple days before." He pauses, but she just watches him with a dark kind of curiosity. "The bomb hit us harder there." He sighs, trying to explain this next part without sounding like a complete idiot.

"And forced you into this world?"

"Kind of?" he murmurs, hating himself for the question in his voice. "The losses of consciousness – it's when I slip back."

She blinks. "The _we _you mentioned..."

And now he feels like an absolute idiot, because he _saw _her act, he called her out on it, and she still set him enough at ease to throw around plural pronouns that could leave no doubt as to whom he was referencing. "Yeah," he sighs, confirming the question she didn't even bother to ask.

"And these – memories - are interfering with your ability to recall reality?"

He can't help it. "I'm not – this isn't my reality," he says, too aware of how it sounds, too aware of the disbelief that lurks in the darkness of her pupils.

A flicker of helplessness flashes through her eyes, like she can't begin to decide where to start with him, before her ironclad control returns. "But," she starts, her voice low and commanding, "if we pretended it was –"

"Beckett –" he sighs.

"Just humor me," she coaxes, apparently starting to understand that he's never going to say no to any version of her.

He lets the air sink slowly from his lungs. "Total blank up until yesterday morning."

She arches a calculating eyebrow at him. "Yesterday?"

Gesturing at the staircase, he answers her, tries to stop fighting the incredulity in her stare. "When, to my complete confusion, I woke up in an unfamiliar bedroom with Meredith."

"Meredith. The woman from whom you'd just gotten a divorce?"

"Nice whom," he mutters, can't help but want to steer their conversation to any topic other than his lack of knowledge of her world and his ex-wife.

She doesn't even acknowledge him. "You hadn't been separated?"

"You would know as well as I would," he breathes with a sigh.

Her fingers press firmly into her temple, and then she's pushing off her stool, standing stiffly with her arms braced against the counter.

He tries for her, tries for anything that will erase that tight and frustrated look from her face. "Even if we had been separated, Meredith and I have always had the kind of relationship where it wouldn't have surprised me if we'd had one last fling."

"So there's a Meredith in your - reality," she says, her gaze still fixed firmly ahead.

"Yes. We divorced when Alexis was still young."

She pivots toward him slightly. "I see."

"This is _not_ just some deranged fantasy," he says, his words so utterly ineffectual in the harsh light of this house, doing nothing to anchor the existence of that other dark and drifting world.

Her head tilts, a quiet assessment in her look. "And we – work together over there."

He can't. A fierce kind of protectiveness thuds in time with his pulse: he won't give up the details of his relationship with his Beckett, won't lay them bare to watch the incredulity light up her eyes. "Maybe it would help me if you told me about how we know each other here. You know. Spark my memory."

"I'm not entirely sure that's relevant," Beckett says, satisfyingly more on the defensive, but her dubbing is off, her lips moving more slowly than her words.

"Shit," he slurs, the wave of exhaustion pitching the stool out from underneath him. "I don't think I can..."

Her hands are immediately at his ribs, firm and electric and steadily guiding his descent to the roiling floor. "It's okay," he hears. "I got you."

* * *

"I got him," he hears, her voice echoing softly through the darkness, her fingers clenched firmly on his shoulder.

"Beckett," he grits out, struggling to open his eyes to the sight of her standing in his living room, waiting for the sharp sting of her palm to startle him into wakefulness.

But it doesn't come and the seconds tick on and finally he feels her lips soft on his temple, her voice low in his ear. "Castle, you okay?" she murmurs.

He startles, shakes his head, tries to clear the fog from his brain. "Just – disoriented." He tries to adjust, mentally mapping her face – the swish and sway of her bright waves of hair, the lightness and the love at the edges of her irises.

He feels the pressure lighten on his shoulder, the slight shift of her body away from him. "See?" she snaps.

"Lanie'll go with you," he hears Esposito offer earnestly, then the sharp sound of skin smacking leather.

"Because Lanie's just sitting around waiting for you to tell her where to go, is she?" the MD sasses.

"Sorry, sorry," Esposito mumbles, thoroughly cowed by whatever she's just managed to do to him.

"I already got Perlmutter covering the Donna Hudson case for me," Lanie sighs. "I don't think he'd appreciate taking over Tricia Arnett too, but even if I did play hooky, my medical opinion is that our favorite writer needs to see a specialist yesterday."

"I _am_ here," Castle grouses, shifting to sit up a little straighter. "And a specialist isn't going to help anything."

"You get a medical degree for book research once, Castle?" Lanie needles.

It's easy, almost criminally easy, now that he's said it to both his Becketts. "I'm caught between universes," he announces.

The silence is sudden and stifling. Beckett's fingers skim up and down the back of his neck, a steady, soothing rhythm that barely breaks when he makes the announcement. Esposito clears his throat, a low and skeptical cough. "Between universes?" he asks.

"He says that's what's been happening to him since the bomb," Beckett says.

"What do you mean, _he says_?" Castle asks, the muscles of his neck tensing against her hand.

"Castle, if you're having vivid hallucinations combined with periods of unconsciousness –" Lanie starts.

"They're not_ hallucinations_," he growls, shifting up, feeling the stiff leather of the couch creaking underneath him.

He hadn't been sitting on a leather couch.

"Where are we?" he asks abruptly.

"If they're not hallucinations then what the hell do you think they are?" Lanie hisses.

"Evidence room," Esposito says.

"He says it's too vivid to be dreams," Beckett murmurs, her fingers still trailing over the back of his neck as she responds to Lanie.

"At the twelfth?" Castle asks, tries to direct the question in Esposito's direction.

"What other evidence room do you think you would be in, Castle?" Lanie asks, an edge to her voice that he's certain means that she's about to start pushing for the hospital again.

"Why are we in the evidence room?" Castle asks.

"Hiding," Esposito says. Castle doesn't need to see to tell he's bristling.

"We weren't sure where else go to. We had to leave the safe house, since we technically don't need protecting anymore. We wheeled you out in the chair and then swung by here. Ryan snuck upstairs to copy the Cullen file and to collect everything we've gathered on the bomb, but we figured we should try to stay low-profile," Beckett says.

"Last I checked, we were in an FBI safe house, Lanie. And thank you, Esposito, for not patronizing me."

"Only because you're too pathetic," Esposito grouses.

"Nobody's patronizing you, Castle," Lanie says in an utterly patronizing voice.

"We're worried," Beckett adds, her voice low and soothing and enticing, and he considers whispering into her ear that _she _is welcome to patronize him whenever she'd like.

"Well, Ryan will be back soon with the files, unless Gates realizes what he's doing and dismembers him, and we need to figure out where we're going," Esposito says.

"The _hospital_," Lanie snaps.

"Oh my God," Castle says, lurching halfway to his feet in a sudden convulsion. "Oh my _God_."

Beckett's hand is at his back and he can hear Esposito and Lanie's sharp, indrawn breaths. "What the hell is it, Castle?" Esposito growls.

"Did you _put me on a murder couch?"_

There's a choked sound from Beckett that sounds closer to a laugh than a sob. Her hand fists in the back of his shirt, tugs him back down to the couch. He makes sure to sit on the edge.

"Seriously, Castle?" Esposito asks.

"It sure as hell is _about _to be a murder couch," Lanie snaps.

"You did," Castle decides. "There aren't usually couches in evidence, and it wouldn't be down here unless it was absolutely vital to an investigation, which means that somebody _died_ directly where I am sitting."

"I'm sitting here too, Castle," Beckett says, and it's almost worth sitting in a dead person's bodily fluids to hear the low rasp of a smile at the edge of her tone.

"That's just as bad. I _touch _you," he replies, tapping at her hipbone with his index finger.

Esposito coughs vehemently, clears his throat. "I think we're getting away from the point at hand."

"The point being that we're getting the bomb case, the Cullen case, and all protection dragged away from us at the same time? Because I haven't forgotten," Castle says.

Beckett's hand reaches out, squeezes his knee, her nails digging through his jeans. "I don't know if trust the hospital, Lanie," she murmurs, her touch a little shaky, a little desperate.

"It's the case," Castle announces. "The bomb happened outside Yost's house in the other universe, too."

"What a coincidence," Esposito says dryly.

"It's not a _coincidence,_" Castle replies, trying not to feel helpless. "Is Ryan getting back soon?"

"Feeling lonely without a fellow conspiracy theorist?" Esposito quips.

"It would be nice if _someone _in this room were a little more open-minded."

"My dad's cabin?" Beckett asks, entirely ignoring his conversation with Esposito.

Castle pivots toward her. Her fingers jostle briefly on his leg. "Look, you either believe that the situation has blown over or you don't, but you don't need to bother suggesting something ridiculous."

There's a brief, tense pause, her frustrated exhale, then footfalls and Ryan's overly-cheerful voice. "Got it," he says triumphantly. Castle can picture him holding a handful of copies over his head. "There was a tricky moment with Gates when I had to dive behind a chair in the break room, but it all worked out."

"You really don't think you could have managed walking casually by her?" Esposito asks.

Lanie sighs at him. "Javi, have you _seen_ Ryan try to break the rules? Stop trying to corrupt him."

"We were just discussing our options about where we can stick our disaster magnet here," Esposito tells Ryan.

"Hey," Castle whines, trying not to let the gratefulness seep into his tone, trying not let Esposito know how very thankful he is for the reversion to gallows humor that's been gradually happening since they reached the familiar ground of the 12th.

"We could keep eyes on you," Ryan offers.

"No," Beckett says immediately. "You both have to work tomorrow, and I _know _you haven't been getting much sleep."

"Well neither of you are going on a hideaway trip to Aruba anytime soon," Lanie tells them.

"Private security?" Ryan lobs.

"You think you can trust them anymore than you could trust a cop from the 12th?" Esposito growls.

A dark quiet settles over the group, a tense lull in which he is too aware of the shuffle of fabric as people shift, the low sighs of breath, the hum of the fluorescent lights.

"Immanuel Cat," Ryan blurts suddenly, far too loudly. Castle's heart jackrabbits painfully in his chest.

"Are you trying to give us all heart attacks?" Beckett snaps, her voice a little breathy.

"It's catching," Esposito whispers ominously.

"I'm sorry, _what_?" Lanie asks.

"Jenny's second cousin's cat. Janette and her husband are away for a couple days and their usual house sitter's gone, so we're supposed to check in on it. Him. Immanuel Cat."

"_That _is how you name an animal," Castle grumbles.

"Just to get this straight, your brilliant idea is to have them go to Jenny's second cousin's house to – cat-sit?"

"Look, it's a gorgeous house, it's out of the way, and if you need to get back to Manhattan it's under an hour. You can recoup there as Esposito and I try to figure out if this whole case wrap-up is legit."

"Don't need a day to tell you _that_," Esposito growls.

"Where is this place?" Lanie asks.

"Greenwich," Ryan supplies.

"Greenwich," Castle echoes.

"You can borrow my car," Lanie offers.

"You gonna be able to drive and check for tails?" Esposito asks.

"I'm fine," Beckett says, a defensive challenge beneath the words.

"Connecticut?" Castle asks.

"No, England. Jenny and Ryan were gonna fly there for a weekend to check on a cat," Lanie says.

"You're funny," Ryan says.

"I just –" Castle starts, ready to rattle off a question, an explanation, anything, but the words are bumping and tangling and stacking at the back of his throat.

"Castle?" Beckett murmurs.

Her fingers stay firm at his knee, a jagged clench that makes his pulse thump in a desperate response, but even that's not enough to dispel the sudden wave of dizziness. "Hate to say it," he says, tongue thick and heavy, his world already brightening, "but I think I might need to take a quick nap on the murder couch."


	13. Chapter 13

He wraps his arm around the solid warmth next to him, shifts to burrow more deeply under the blanket, then startles the rest of the way to wakefulness at a shooting pain in his hip.

He's lying on his side on the kitchen floor, his body curled around the dog, a plush comforter draped over his back and tucked halfway underneath him, a pillow propping up his head. He rolls over onto his back, feels his spine creak and then snap into alignment, sucks in a breath at the wet, reproachful nose of Gus at his temple. "Sorry buddy," he groans. "Gotta face our day." He pauses, contemplates. "Night." He can't quite see the windows from where he lies. "Lives."

He shoves himself upright, wincing as his back pops again, then startles back a good six inches at the unexpected sight of her. Gus shifts and curls into Castle's side, nudging the writer's elbow with his forehead, but Castle can focus on nothing but the sight in front of him.

She's slumped back against a cabinet, her legs folded underneath her, her arms twisted together at her stomach. Her head's lolled onto her left shoulder, a position that would look horrifyingly disjointed on anyone else and manages to look just slightly awkward for her. Her jaw is clenched even in sleep, a tension that he can see radiates through her back and shoulders.

An assortment of things is spread in front of her – a laptop that he recognizes as the one from upstairs, several notebooks, an iPad, a stack of magazines, a scrawled grocery list, a couple photo albums. He's not sure what most of it is, not sure why she's gathered it together or why she's dozing slumped on the floor in front of him, not sure what possessed her to dredge up a duvet and pillow for him, not sure why she sleeps with such a brittle set to her shoulders when he's only ever seen his Beckett sleep with parted lips and a soft and warm looseness to her.

It's easier to contemplate than the disconnected threads of his own life here. His marriage to Meredith that stretched on for two decades, the string of Storm novels and the house in Greenwich and the dog named Gus and everything else that he has no desire to consider.

He scoots forward carefully, edging himself along the floor, skirting her amassed collection until he's right in front of her, until he can trace a finger lightly over her kneecap.

She sucks in a sudden breath and uncoils, her eyes open but unseeing, her head slamming back into the cabinet, her fingers balling into fists.

"Hey, hi, it's just me," he says quietly, holding up both palms in a gesture of surrender.

Her eyes snap into focus and she groans, reaching a hand up to rub at the undoubtedly-swelling knot on the back of her head. "Castle. What the hell?" she murmurs, but there's no malice in it, just the rough edge of sleep and a quiet kind of confusion.

He smiles slightly, keeps his gaze fixed on hers. "I could ask you the same thing. I mean, really, Beckett, covering me with a duvet and then watching me sleep?"

A flush creeps along the sides of her neck, skips up to the arches of her cheekbones. "Just trying to make sure my key bombing witness isn't going to turn up dead on my watch," she says. "Didn't mean to doze off," she adds quietly.

"It'd be a hell of a thing to have to explain to the Greenwich Police," he agrees. He's having trouble wrapping his brain around her sudden act of altruism, but he's not about to berate any version of Beckett for sleeping in the same room as him, even unintentionally. "My death, not your dozing. Although I'm sure they'd be shocked by either one."

"I sleep," she says, an utterly reflexive response that she clearly has to use far too often.

He arches an eyebrow at her, but it's not his place, not here. Instead, he turns, surveying the spread of items in front of her. "If you were trying to steal my stuff, you did a horrible job of it."

She clears her throat, glancing at the floor. "I thought – I know you're coming from the context of this – alternate reality. But something from – here - _must _have let you know about the bomb."

"So you grabbed some things you thought might help me remember."

She nods at his laptop. "What could it hurt, right?"

"Tried it yesterday," he admits, feeling the slow crawl of embarrassment up his spine. "Couldn't figure out how to log in."

Her lips press together briefly, a flash of disappointment in her eyes that flares and then dissipates. He knows it's for the case, for the unsolvable mystery of his connection with that explosion, but he lets himself hope that it's for him, for her deep and unacknowledged desire for him to be whole.

"You try your phone?"

"Yeah," he sighs, almost ashamed to admit it – it feels like snooping for some reason, even though it's _his _phone, his life. "No dazzling pictures – or any pictures at all. Not linked to an email. Hell of a lot of games on it, though."

She sighs, then reaches out, nudging a thick white album at him. "Try this?"

He indulges her, flips it open, winces at the first picture of a younger incarnation of himself in a tuxedo smiling at Meredith, who's wearing a ridiculously ornate white dress, carefully arranged on Burberry throw in the middle of a field. "Wedding album. I _knew _it looked familiar."

Beckett blinks at him. "Thought you didn't remember."

"Where I'm from, I was married to Meredith for an entirely too-long two years. I have no idea how I survived twenty of them." He scoots across the floor as he talks, leans back against the unforgiving redwood cabinet a respectable foot and a half away from her.

"What happened?" she asks, folding forward and dragging over another album.

He shifts, settles into a more comfortable slump. "Here, I've got no clue. There, I found her in bed with a director."

Beckett's gaze flicks over him, her eyes full of a dark kind of sympathy. "That sucks," she finally says.

"It kind of did," he concedes, lets some of the honesty behind the admission shine through. He realizes, an odd combination of interest and shame washing over him, that he's never told his Beckett this story. He reaches over, gently pulls the leather-bound album from her hands. "This one looks promising," he says.

"Sure does," she hums. He glances over to see if it's a veiled way of calling him out on what was admittedly not his smoothest transition, but she's looking at the album intently, not giving anything away.

She doesn't seem to realize she's sitting next to him on the floor, or she's so focused on her new mission of recovering his memory that she doesn't even care, so he takes the chance, edges an inch closer under the guise of sharing the view of the pictures with her. He flips it open, and right away there's an eight by ten of Alexis at eleven, maybe twelve years old. She's standing with him next to some kind of twisted, gnarled tree, and she's beaming, her hand wrapped around his elbow, her profile glowing golden in the waning light.

"That your daughter?" Beckett is asking, but his brain is suddenly stuttering over that one thought – _the waning light, the waning light – _and the memory startles through him so violently that it makes him dizzy:

_Dad, pay attention, there's a baby wombat, _his daughter was saying, her fingers tapping at his elbow, sticking slightly to the skin that wouldn't stop sweating in the still-hot setting sun just north of Perth. He'd started to turn in that direction but swiveled back at the click of a camera, seeing Meredith smiling behind it, a loose kind of ease to her shoulders that he hadn't seen in months and months.

Beckett's hand is on his shoulder.

Beckett's hand is firm and warm and comforting on his shoulder and he wishes she would throw her arms around him; he wishes he were allowed to crawl into her lap and close his eyes and wake up to something that made _sense_.

"You remembered something?" Beckett breathes, but he's not sure how to even begin to address that. She must take his silence as confirmation. "Hey, Castle, that's okay. That's _good_."

He realizes he's pressing the heels of his hands into his eyes, pushing hard enough for a kaleidoscope of color to fracture and reform at the edges of his vision. He drops his hands, blinks blearily at her with hazed vision. "That's not my memory," he grits out.

She looks so damn hopeful, a ridiculous contrast to the churning nausea deep in his stomach, the roiling unease that pulses hotly through his bloodstream. "I know you don't feel like that right now," she says, her voice a low and soothing murmur, sounding so very much like his Beckett for a moment that he can't help but tilt toward her, can't stop himself from leaning at a sound that's so familiar, "and I know how uncomfortable this must feel, but you can't let that stop you. You can't let yourself keep repressing things."

"It's not _repressing_," he growls.

"Okay. Okay. Why don't we just – how about we look through the album a little more?"

"How about we not?" he manages, still feeling that sparking hurt, the pain from the cracks in the foundation of the only world he knows.

She clenches her jaw, staring at him with a mixture of determination and supplication. "I need to know who set that bomb," she says, "and I need to know who murdered Elizabeth Cullen." He shakes his head, starts to answer, but she pushes resolutely onward. "I know you don't think that you have the answers, Castle, but _I_ think you do. You say you know me. You say you trust me. So _help_ me."

She's not even trying to be subtle about her emotional blackmail, but it works, damnit, of course it works. He flips the page of the album, sees a picture of a version of himself that he doesn't know squatting next to Alexis, both of them reaching out to a small grey kangaroo, then feeding it in the next several images. Beckett scoots closer so that he doesn't have to hold the album at an awkward angle, shifting so that their hips are almost brushing, so that he can feel the heat radiating from her thigh. He chances a glance over at her, sees her looking at the picture with a kind of fondness he'd never have anticipated, sees her absorbedly tracing the image of him and his daughter with her gaze.

_You remember anything_, he expects her to ask, braces himself for the disappointment in her eyes, for that sharp counterpoint to his rush of relief at his lack of memories from these pictures, but she surprises him again. "Let's just try a couple more," she murmurs.

"Okay," he says, fighting back his reflexive denial.

He'd hoped it was a collection of them in Australia, but it's more of a random mix than that, a hodgepodge mix that contains everything from the totally alien to the far-too-close-to-home:

Alexis and Meredith grinning into the sun, the young teenager jauntily dressed in a softball uniform.

Alexis standing in front of the Eiffel tower, sticking her tongue out at whoever's taking the picture.

Himself and Alexis snuggling a tiny puppy – most probably Gus, he realizes, absently reaching out to scratch the Golden Retriever's shoulder – in the middle of a patch of grass.

Alexis curled into their favorite nook in the corner of one of the third floor archive rooms at the Public Library, an oversized book spread across her lap, her face utterly absorbed with whatever's in those pages.

He catches Beckett's eyes flicking over him sometimes, her gaze soft and open. "It's sweet," she murmurs when he stops at the library picture, his head aching. "This is sweet."

He bites back his reflexive _too bad it's not actually me that's being sweet_, silently looks at the wall, the album, the sympathetic light in her eyes. "It's not working," he says quietly. "I don't – remember."

She's still watching him with that look painted across her face, a gentleness that doesn't dissipate at his total lack of recognition of any of the pictures. "You will," she says to him. "I know you will."

He lifts a hand toward her, his head throbbing, his movements suddenly sluggish, his body trapped in a viscous kind of liquid. "I don't want to," he admits in a whisper, feeling the darkness start to creep in as his fingers glance off the sharp jut of her collarbone, grateful, so grateful, for the spiraling drag back to his broken and familiar universe.

* * *

He wakes, again, to the vibration of a car beneath him, to the deep and surrounding darkness for which he has never been so thankful.

"Beckett?" he roughs out.

"Hey," he hears, a nearby murmur. He sits tensely, his body thrumming, and it takes him a moment to realize that he's waiting for her touch. Another moment after that to realize it's not coming.

"You're _driving?_" he grits out.

"I haven't taken any painkillers in a while," she says, like that's somehow supposed to make things _better._

"Great," he says. "I suppose you wheeled me back to the car by yourself, too."

"Ryan and Esposito had it covered." Her voice is quiet, unsubstantial and distant without her touch alongside it.

"Oh," he murmurs flatly.

"I'm sorry," she says after a beat of silence. "I know it must be disconcerting to keep shuffling you around like this."

He clears his throat. "Ryan and Esposito just - let you leave like that?"

"They're still back at the 12th. Trying to push at the tech guys over at the 17th – they think Cullen might have had a second email, something on her computer. There's some seriously loose ends that got dropped in the shuffle when they shifted responsibilities after the bomb." She sighs, trails off. He can imagine her shaking her head, can picture the exhausted light in her eyes, the tense and tired line of her arms.

"Still focusing on Cullen, then," he murmurs.

"You're the one who insisted on the connection between the case and the bomb."

"Gonna stand by that one," he mutters, feeling the car ease around a bend, then slowly roll up a slight incline.

"We're here," she says. "Hell of a McMansion."

It's a visceral awareness more than anything – the sense that this place is one that's imprinted on the rhythms of his life, the sense of familiarity that settles deep in his bones as the car slows to a stop. "Great," he hums, choking back all the things that snarl in his throat, clamoring to get out, whispers of another world full of light and Golden Retrievers and the skeptical shadows in her eyes as she stares at him from the kitchen floor.

Her fingers brush lightly along his temple, slip down to skim the scruff at his jaw, and he huffs out a long breath he didn't even know he was holding, the slow slide of her skin over his soothing him in a way her distant words could not.

"Hang on," she whispers, her hand falling away from his face. "I'll come around. "

He hears her door open, her quiet and too-controlled breathing, the shuffle of her clothing against the seat as she carefully leverages herself out of the car. His fingers reach out, fumble into his door handle and yank on the curve of metal. His chest is tight with frustration, with the need to _move_, so he shoves the door open and presses himself up into the cool night air, feels his balance sway awkwardly as he finally stands unanchored.

He hears her sigh as she moves closer to him, and then her fingers are coasting over his bicep, stroking gently up his forearm, her breath breezing softly along the side of his neck.

"There's stars," she murmurs throatily, her words fluttering over the cotton of his shirt.

He can all too easily picture the diffusion of city light as he stood under a darkening sky next to the nearby pool, as he threw a ball over the lawn to an aging Golden Retriever. He can picture the emerging stars, faint flickers that he'd barely registered as he'd grown cold and waited, waited for another version of Beckett to call him. "Let's go," he murmurs. She tugs him forward in an immediate response, but he finds himself following sluggishly, the weight of reluctance dragging him back, pulling him away from this place that's soaked with memories that aren't his own.

Beckett leads him silently over the smoothly paved driveway, guides him up the stairs of the front porch, fumbles with the key at the front door. He hears the clatter of metal on tile, sees, in the back of his mind, a haunted version of Beckett with spikey hair glaring at him from this same entranceway.

"Sorry," she murmurs, her hand leaving him, and he realizes she's been trying to unlock the door with her shattered arm so that she could leave her hand in his.

He bites the inside of his cheek to keep from saying anything, feels a metallic trickle of blood start to fill his mouth, presses his tongue against the swelling to keep it all inside –_what the hell do you think you're doing to yourself _and _there's no way we're possibly that safe here _and _I know this place._

"Got it," she breathes after a quiet moment. Her voice rushes on to fill the straining silence. "Had to twist it at a weird angle."

Her hand slides over his again, her slim fingers chilled but their grip firm as she pulls him through the doorway. He sucks in a breath, tries for her. "That was almost too much of a lob, Beckett."

She stills just after the entrance, and he hears the quiet thump of the door closing, the soft snick of a light switch. A ridiculous disappointment wells up in his throat when the world doesn't brighten around him, when he remains ensconced in the encompassing darkness. "I think the bedroom's this way," she says, pulling lightly at his hand.

There are so many lewd jokes he could make, so many ways he could shrug it off and drag her towards where he knows the living room is, but he's tired, suddenly, so tired of fighting just to remain on his feet. "You need to stop treating me like an invalid, Beckett."

"I'm not –"

"This could be my _life_," he says with a vehement kind of anger he hadn't realized was there. It's somehow been easier to deal with, knowing that he'll open his eyes to another Beckett every time he closes them in this world, but the reality of never seeing _her _again, of all the light and life in front of him that he will miss, sloshes through his stomach with a roiling kind of nausea.

Her fingers clench hard around his hand. "You think I don't _know_ that? You think I haven't spent eighty percent of the time you're passed out trying to figure out who the hell would want you dead and the other twenty percent talking to expert ophthalmologists from around the country and searching the best place to adopt a seeing eye dog?"

He sucks in a breath, the ferocity of her words rendering him momentarily speechless, adrift. Her fingers loosen, but he swears he can feel a trembling regret pulsing through her.

"I know this place," he tells her, the words spilling out of him in a reciprocal kind of honestly that he is powerless to stop. He shifts his grip to run his index finger along the heel of her hand in a steady, rhythmic motion that he knows under different circumstances would have her gasping underneath him in minutes.

"You – what?" Her muscles tense beneath his hand as she tries to draw away, but he tightens his grip, then loosens it, again skids his finger in a long and languorous circle, cajoling her into staying with him.

"It's where I –" he cuts himself off, briefly winding down all the convoluted paths that sentence could take, but the brush of something small and warm into the side of his calf startles him backwards.

"The cat," Beckett supplies, barely missing a beat. "And it's what?" He swallows, searches for a way to explain that would make some kind of sense. "It's where you go when you're unconscious? Where you're married to Meredith?"

"Recently divorced from Meredith," he can't help but correct. The cat's body, vibrating with an insistent kind of need, presses more adamantly against his leg.

Her hand bumps up and then down in his grip, and he can imagine her helpless shrug, the skeptical narrowing of her eyes. When she speaks, though, it's full of more desolation and less cynicism than he had ever envisioned. "I don't understand what you're trying to tell me here, Castle," she breathes.

"I'm not trying to tell you anything," he grits out. "This is where I go. There's a huge elm tree at the bottom of the driveway that has a left branch twisted into a perfect _z_. Where we're standing, you can see the glass sliding doors at the back that lead out to some impressive stonework around a wave-shaped pool and then this ridiculously sprawling lawn."

Her hand is tense and clammy in his. "What are you playing at here, Castle?"

The cat's purring frenetically, practically wrapping itself around his leg. "I need you to believe me," he says after a long moment. "I don't know who will if you don't."

But he can feel, even as he says it, how she's pulled away from him without moving; he can feel the layers of ice and silence between them. "I need to see if Ryan and Espo are making any headway on the case," she says, her voice so distant. "I'll bring you to the couch."

She's already tugging him forward, and he's not sure what he can do but follow, stumbling over the damn cat every other step. His words tangle in his throat, leaving him utterly unable to voice any of the comfort she'll never admit she so desperately needs.

"You must be tired," she says. "Long drive and all."

He searches her tone for any trace of irony, an acknowledgement that the drive wasn't that long or that he was _passed out _for most of it, but there's nothing, nothing but that distant kind of iciness, a withdrawal that in and of itself betrays her pain and confusion.

"Call me if you need me," she says with a perfunctory brush of her lips over his forehead, and then her footfalls are treading quickly, heavily away from him.

He sits silently on the couch, starts to trace the threads of the case, Elizabeth Cullen and her yet-untapped email and her maybe-affair with Yost, but none of it makes sense, and it all keeps leading him back, back to the explosion of the bomb and the brush of her short hair beneath his fingers, back to the tangle of worlds that he wants nothing more than to avoid.

He closes his eyes and blanks his mind, forces himself to drift in nothing but that dark and formless void. Her voice drifts back to him from the kitchen, no doubt on her phone call with the boys, but he doesn't focus on it, doesn't try to catch the words, only lets himself get lost in darkness, willing himself into a numb and thoughtless peace.

Even so, it's a long time before his breathing slows, before the edges of the darkness start to brighten and he feels that far and distant pull back toward the light.


	14. Chapter 14

He wakes slowly, languorously, tendrils of some far-away dream wrapping around him, a sun-licked beach and the flicker of woman's smile and the warm weight of his daughter pressed against his side. He lifts his arms above his head, sighs through the comforting ache of his shoulders popping and his back cracking.

She's on the couch, almost in the same place he was when he drifted away from that dark world. Her legs are curled neatly under her, the laptop balanced on her thighs, her fingers flying over his keyboard, pausing, then starting again. Her eyes are intent, her forehead creased in frustration, the set and slope of her shoulders betraying both her determination and her exhaustion.

"You finding an extensive porn collection on that thing?" he asks, his voice gravelly with something like sleep. "Because I can't claim any responsibility."

Her chin jerks, her gaze snapping up to focus on his face. "You're awake."

He pushes himself slowly off the floor, arches up onto the balls of his feet, his back cracking again. "Yeah," he murmurs.

It jolts through him, sometimes, crackles an unwanted current of awareness through his blood: this woman does not know him. This woman does not know him, and so many of their interactions today have been him sliding into what can only appear to be inexplicable periods of unconsciousness. This woman does not know him, and she has driven his anesthetized self across state lines, she has wrapped him in a duvet and wedged a pillow under his head on his own kitchen floor, she has waited for him patiently to regain awareness when she has had absolutely no business waiting for him.

She shifts herself sideways on the couch, as much of an invitation as he'd ever hoped from her. He walks over, sinks down onto the cushion beside her, leans back, feeling an aching exhaustion deep in his bones.

She's watching him intently, her eyes open, assessing, sympathetic. "First time I passed out I was seventeen," she says. He barely manages to suppress the surprised lift of his eyebrow. Somewhere at the corner of his consciousness, he feels himself canting forward, his elbows leaning onto his knees, his shoulders tilting at her, every beat of his pulse orienting toward the story she's telling. "I was horrified."

"Making bad life choices?" he asks, letting his tone adopt a cavalier lilt as he arches an eyebrow at her.

"Atrocious ones," she says, that self-deprecating, wry smile twisting her lips up as she lapses into a pause.

"Oh, Kate Beckett, you can't end it there."

"Circumstances notwithstanding," she sighs, a fondness still flitting at the edges of her tone, "I remember coming to in a field. My then-boyfriend was hovering over me, along with several police officers."

He wrinkles his nose. "That sounds unpleasant."

The small, sardonic smile's still there. "What I remember most isn't feeling hurt, or tired, or woozy, although I'm sure I was all of those things. What I remember most was this overwhelming out-of-body feeling – the way everyone kept asking me questions I couldn't answer, the blank stretch of the night before that I'd had no way to access, and this horrible frustration that people wouldn't just _understand." _

He pauses, waits, but that's apparently all the story he's getting from her right now. "For such an elegant and yet transparent attempt at ethos you at least owe me more than a _'circumstances notwithstanding_,'" he finally says.

She rolls her eyes affectionately, the layer of sleepy domesticity settling over them both, the magic of hooking into pieces of each other's lives, peeling back small strips of the protective layers that encapsulate them so completely.

"I was a minor, so of course they called my mother," she says with a wince. She still has the laptop perched on her thighs, her gaze flitting away from him so that she can stare unseeing at the top of the screen. Her voice has a rawness to it, a rasp that crests almost to a break, that he's heard before, years ago, when his own Beckett would mention her mother.

He feels himself leaning even further toward her, her story, parsed out in such small and unwilling pieces, reeling him in with the same inevitable pull he always feels. He'd been hoping for some debaucherous scandal of the notwithstanding circumstances that had led up to her waking up in a field, but this, her sudden stumble into a story about her mother that has her breaking eye contact with him, this is more than that. This is something he thinks she doesn't even realize she's giving him, a connection far past the establishment of ethos he's just mocked.

"My dad was out of town. She sat me at the kitchen table, made me a coffee, sat down across from me, and just stared at me."

He gives an exaggerated shudder, the motion temporarily drawing her gaze back to him. "That sounds horrifying."

She smiles weakly. "By then, that out-of-body experience had worn off and I'd felt too awful to be horrified. We sat there for three hours. I wanted to go upstairs and get to sleep, but I wasn't about to ask. She said ten words to me the whole time, all of them right before she got up."

Castle waits in her pause, hovers in the lull between her words. It's taken five years, but he knows the exact quality of silence to project so that sometimes she'll keep talking, he knows the poise in her shoulders and slight hitch in her swallow that means that, given enough time, she'll start up again on her own.

"_Kate Beckett, I want to see you live past twenty," _she intones, then lapses abruptly into silence.

She doesn't say the rest, but she doesn't need to: _She didn't_.

"Anyway," she says, her tone too forcibly bright. He can practically see her pulling herself back from the brink of the impending breakdown that she will never let herself have in front of him. "I was just trying to hack into your laptop here. See if I could find anything useful. But…"

"No luck?" he asks easily, swallowing down the snarl in his throat.

"Useless," she hums, the sheen in her eyes almost undetectable.

He has a sudden, fervent wish that he would remember something else. Anything. Something from this world that would give her that crackling hope of a new lead, that sense of purpose. Something that would anchor him here. Something that would let him give _her _an anchor here.

He's not stupid. He knows he pushed farther than she wanted, knows she shared more than she meant to, but he also knows that this was exactly her intended result: to build a rapport, to make him feel more comfortable with all the ways he is adrift here, to make him want - more.

It doesn't matter that he knows. Kate Beckett is welcome to manipulate him any day.

She pushes up suddenly, abruptly, her movements jerky and awkward. "I'm going to call my people. See what they've been finding. We need to go back soon. We can't just be sitting in Connecticut while this investigation is happening. We've wasted enough time already."

He watches her walk towards the back door as she pulls her cell phone out of her pocket, watches her halt when Gus, absent until now, lopes up to her and pushes his nose into her knee, watches the shaky set of her shoulders as she pauses to run a hand over the dog's head. And then she's yanking the door open and stepping into the cool night air, Gus trotting purposefully beside her, and he's once again left sitting on a couch in the living room, once again left hovering in limbo.

* * *

He wakes to darkness and the disconcerting feeling that he knows exactly where he is.

That same living room, that same feeling of reaching out to Beckett and finding her hopelessly, helplessly out of reach. The same muffled silence in which he had eventually, so slowly, drifted into unconsciousness.

Here, at least, there's more he can do about it. "Beckett," he calls, swallowing a churning sense of dependency. _It's good_, he tells himself. Good that he can't pull away, sink back into that place of hurt and anger in which he stops talking and she stops talking and they keep brushing up against each other with the weight of too much silence on both their shoulders.

A thump, a shuffle, then a breathless, "You okay?" from nearby. Her voice is fuzzy, tinged with sleep.

"Yeah," he says, trying not to stutter. "Just." He can't describe it, can't explain the disconcerting feeling of falling from one universe to the next. "Did the boys find anything?"

She exhales a sharp sigh. "Nothing important."

Which means yes, he decides, but it's something she's not going to share. And he is suddenly so unbearably tired. He is suddenly so entirely lacking the energy to push her, to fight her.

"I'm sorry," she says, her words quiet. He can hear another shuffle – her sitting up? – and when she speaks again, her voice is louder, more self-assured. "I'm sorry I walked away earlier. That wasn't – I hadn't intended to do that."

He bites back all his questions and all his acerbic remarks, lets a halfhearted smile twitch at the corners of his mouth. "It's okay," he finally says.

"You're still tired," she murmurs.

He's not sure how to respond. "Yeah," he finally says.

"Because you're – switching universes," she gets out.

He starts to think that maybe she wasn't resting at all. Starts to form the image of her slumped in a chair, her gaze fixed on him as he slept, her mind roiling, churning over all the different types of brain damage that the doctors could have missed in his too-brief stay at the hospital that would account for his lapses of consciousness, for his sudden belief in this alternate dimension. "Yeah."

"I've been thinking –" she begins, then pauses. Another soft scrape of denim over upholstery. "I've been thinking that we need to get back to a hospital." He starts to protest, but she keeps going before he can get a word in. "For both of us," she says, but he hears the _for you_ that underpins her words.

"It's not safe." He doesn't care that Lapinski is in custody. Doesn't care that the case has been transferred. There are so many things that aren't adding up and she's injured and he can't see and they cannot possibly protect each other like this.

"What we're doing now also isn't safe, Castle," she says. Lapses into silence for a moment before the words come out in a rush. "This is your _brain_ we're talking about. We can't keep playing games with your mental health, and we can't keep playing games with your vision. We can hire some private security –"

"Can't trust them," Castle growls.

"Look," she breathes. "We're not exactly in a safe house, here. I know it's not ideal, but none of this is. And you can't – we can't –"

The words spill out of him entirely without his permission. "You were seventeen the first time you'd passed out," he tells her.

He can feel the quality of her silence change. "What are you talking about," she growls, sounding for an instant so much like that other version of herself that his breath catches.

He plows relentlessly on, not letting himself think about the potential damage, not letting himself ponder any of the thousand possible consequences. "The cops brought you home to your mother, who sat at the kitchen table for hours and told you only that she wanted to see you live to twenty."

Though she's at least several feet away from him, he can hear the strain in her breath, the rasp of her every inhale, the trembling effort to pull herself together that she exerts on every exhale. "How the hell do you know that?" she husks.

An unexpected spark of relief flickers through him at the realization that the other version of Beckett wasn't lying to him, that at least at this point, their lives were still the same. "You told me," he murmurs, wishing she were closer.

"I absolutely did not," she snaps, the vehemence of her denial stinging him in a way he doesn't fully understand.

He can't have this conversation with her so distant. He stretches out his hand into the empty darkness and waits, waits in silence until he feels his shoulder ache, waits in silence until the weight of the past several days, hours, minutes, start to fold in on him, start to drag him down.

But then her fingers brush against his and her body is folding down beside him, her skin warm and vibrating slightly with a worried kind of energy. He'd been so lost in his own special kind of hell that he hadn't even heard her walk over.

"You did tell me," he says. "It was just – a different version of you."

He feels her forehead hit his shoulder, feels her sigh into his bicep. "Please tell me you're joking," she says.

"How else would I know, Beckett?" He angles his arm behind her, swirls his fingers in nonsensical patterns over her elbow.

"Maybe I talk in my sleep."

"Really?"

"You drug me?" she asks, her voice rasping with a painful combination of playfulness and distress.

"Believe me, Beckett, I'm all for a game of truth or dare, but I'd prefer you not be on mind-altering substances."

"Ouija board?" she finally gets out, and he can hear the smile underneath her misery, can feel all the ways she's adapted his coping mechanisms in the joking lilt of the words.

"Alexis threw out my only one when she was fourteen and caught me chanting at four in the morning outside her bedroom."

"Why outside her bedroom?" Beckett asks, and if the question is a little rote, a little mechanical, he won't call her on it now.

"Where the spirits were the strongest," he replies nonchalantly.

She falls back into silence. "I don't understand," she finally says.

"Me either," he admits.

"Why –" she starts. "There's an explanation for how you know this."

"I know you think there is," Castle replies.

"A logical explanation. One that's comprehensible."

"I know," he says, running his fingers up and down her arm, tracing a wandering pattern from her shoulder to elbow, elbow to shoulder.

"Okay," she says, turning her head so that her temple's resting against his shoulder, her body pressed more firmly along the side of his. "There's a story. Start from the beginning."


	15. Chapter 15

He wakes to the calm lilt of her voice. "I know." A short pause. "A couple hours, maybe." He slits his eyes open. She's sitting on the armchair, tapping her fingers absently against her thigh. "I'm going to make sure Castle's doing okay before I head on back." Another pause. "No. No. I'm dropping him off at the hospital on the way." She blows out a short breath. "Yes, Esposito, I am quite sure that's not where I need to be, and yes, I remember what I told Montgomery." She sits up a little straighter, her spine unbending. "Nothing," she sighs. "I've just been going down this path all afternoon and evening, and - it's time for me to move on." She drops her hand, thumbs off the call decisively.

Castle clears his throat. "So. The hospital, hm?" She tilts toward him with a steadiness that indicates she'd either known he was awake or was at least prepared for the possibility.

"Yes," she says, an unwavering sort of steel behind the syllable. "This has become more than irresponsible of me, Castle. If I'm going to choose to believe you -" He opens his mouth, tries to reply, but she cuts him off. "If I'm going to choose to _trust_ you, then you have some serious neurological issues happening right now that necessitate your seeing a specialist _immediately._"

"I'm not –"

"I don't want to hear it, Castle," she says, her voice soft, resigned. Inflexible.

"But the bom—"

"I'll make sure you have protection."

"That's not what I meant –"

"I know what you meant. But either I think you were involved in the setting of an explosive device in an NYPD cruiser and I arrest you, or I accept that you weren't involved and I bring you to the damn hospital."

The steadiness of her voice, the resolute way she holds his gaze – she's not going to yield. "Kate –" he tries, but he cuts himself off when he sees her shoulders stiffen, her eyes narrow.

That's not going to work here.

He swallows. Flexes his fingers. Lets the stillness hover in the air for a moment as he mentally resets. "Pass me the laptop?" he asks, holding out a hand, waiting patiently for her to pass him the Macbook from the coffee table.

"Why?" she asks, staring at him suspiciously.

He only pauses for a fraction of a heartbeat. "Finding a local primary care physician. If I do that, you won't just dump me at the nearest hospital tonight, right?"

"I seriously doubt any local doctors will be open," she says, her gaze boring into him, divining every one of his darkest secrets.

"For tomorrow," he elaborates.

"Because a great idea is for you to drive yourself to a doctor when you keep lapsing suddenly into unconsciousness."

"I'll catch a cab," he says, keeping his arm outstretched insistently.

She slowly picks up the laptop, passes it to him, her movements deliberate and assessing. "You're stalling," she concludes.

"Don't know what you're trying to say about me, Beckett," Castle says chipperly as he pushes the laptop open, keeping his eyes fixed on her rather than the screen. "To imply that I'm stalling would be to attribute some kind of nefarious intent that I am oh so clearly lac—" He stops abruptly as his fingers pause, their absent dance over the keyboard complete. The screen kicks up a background of a smiling teenaged Alexis outside some majestic stone building, a tangled mess of file folders and documents strewn over the image.

"What?" she asks.

He shakes his head, staring down at the screen. "I just – I think I just entered my password."

They're both still for a beat, their gazes locked, and then she's shifting half out of the chair, lurching toward him in an aborted motion that ends when she abruptly drops back down.

"Why don't you –"

"If you just give me –"

They both cut themselves off, their gazes still linked with that near-tangible, crackling connection.

She breaks first, jerking her chin away, staring at the dog that's curled up near her feet. "We still have a few minutes," she finally murmurs. "Why don't you – check your email?" He sees it in the back of her gaze, the hope that his memories are recoverable, the hope that something somewhere inside him will crack this case open.

She purposefully pulls out her phone, tilting over awkwardly to card her fingers through the dog's hair and studiously avoiding Castle. Which is – fine, actually, because he can't concentrate on anything other than the spark in her eyes when she's looking at him, and there's a sudden curiosity churning in his gut, a need to know that overrides even his discomfort at the memories that aren't his.

He clicks into Finder and sees the usual – pictures, music, folders for press and writing. He moves instinctively into the writing folder, scans through iteration after iteration of Storm subfolders, clicks in and out of the folder Earlier (his interest wanes and dies a quick death the instant he sees _In a Hail of Bullets_) and Not Safe for Work (this machine must have at least twice the memory of his own laptop to hold so many explicit videos), before clicking on one labeled N/A. It's full of Word docs and Safari pages, a menagerie of random letters and numbers that possesses none of his usually scattered-but-decipherable naming system. He clicks a random link in the middle, feels his heart stutter at the webpage it calls up - _Suspect in Cold Case Brought to Justice_.

He remembers what seems like a lifetime ago, sitting upstairs on this same laptop on a guest login, desperately searching for proof that she was alive and unharmed in this universe, remembers his gaze flicking over this same article at the top of the Google search. There's a small picture of her below the title, standing stiffly next to Montgomery and smiling awkwardly as she shakes the hand of an older man in a suit. He starts to scroll, then stops, suddenly paralyzed by the thought of the dozens upon dozens of icons in the folder.

He taps back to the Finder window, clicks on a random doc, lets the word count unspool in fast-motion at the bottom of the screen until it finally stills at ninety-eight thousand and something words. His gaze trips over the first paragraph – _The detective stepped out of her squad car in the waning sunlight and surveyed the scene with frustration. Dominguez and his team had blocked off a decent radius around what she already knew was a gruesome scene at an otherwise-picturesque Central Park bench, but reporters were packed just outside the crime scene tape, a mess of microphones and high-powered cameras. She took that moment to let herself feel the annoyance, her brow furrowing and her hand briefly clenching. Then she breathed once deeply, smoothed her features, and strode forward with a sense of purpose. She became – as she always had, as she always would – singularly focused on the victim. _

He scrolls quickly through the document, his eyes scanning for phrases, names, anything – _She watched the mother of the dead girl_ – _She walked alone through the city in the dead of night, wanting to go anywhere but to him _– _When she finally felt like she could breathe again, she found she had nothing left to say –_

A nameless female detective.

He'd gotten the relentless drive right. The shadow of the tragedy within her. The unwavering purpose. But there's so much that's missing. Her brief pause before she enters every new crime scene. Her banter with her team. Her slowly-unfurling warmth, the softness beneath her harsh exterior. Her ride-along.

He fumbles the window closed, drags up another doc.

_She met him in the dead of night near the docks. She'd been cold up to that moment, the damp winter air licking along her bare calves, but she felt a spark of warmth catch and smolder within her at the sight of his bulky shadow. _

"What is it?" he hears. He jerks so badly the laptop almost teeters off his thighs.

"Nothing," he says, far too quickly.

He glances back at the screen, the curiosity gnawing viscerally at him, but her voice has drawn out something else, a creeping kind of awkwardness, the sense that this is something he shouldn't be seeing. The sense that, whoever he was when he wrote these, he didn't want anyone else to be reading them. Certainly not when the detective who inspired them – who else could it have been? – is sitting several feet away, pretending to stare at the screen of her iPhone. "Riiiight," she hums, studiously avoiding him again, backing off to give him the room to work it out.

"Just email," he says, guiltily clicking at the mail icon on his taskbar. "Seeing if anything sparks my memory."

He stares unseeingly as thousands of unread messages appear, the never-ending, accusing blue dots unfurling in a vertical line to the left of the subjects. There's countless excited emails from fans – line after line containing the word "Storm" and several enthusiastic exclamation points. He briefly wonders if he's more wildly popular in this world before he remembers that Gina filters through the vast majority of his email for him, a system she started when she'd caught him desperately scrolling through his inbox on the second day of their honeymoon and which she'd kept at through their marriage and divorce.

He's about to return to that tantalizing file folder, guilt be damned, because he can see a doc labeled _xxx_ hovering just at the bottom of the Finder window and the need to know is starting to make his index finger tremble, when the sudden realization washes through him. Whatever connection they've had –

_Kate,_ he types into the search box, scans the line after line of Kate Dawsons and Pettigrews and Smiths that have sent him gushing emails before he tries again – _Beckett. _This time it comes up blank. _Detective,_ he tries, again coming up with a screen that looks utterly useless. _Police, _he attempts, but there's another too-long list that won't help him discern anything about his relationship with her in this world.

He moves to hunt out that_ xxx_ doc, because, really, he's only human, when a name near the bottom of the list makes him catch his breath.

Elizabeth Cullen.

"Beck—" he starts, already clicking to open the email, calling her before he realizes maybe he shouldn't.

"What is it?" she asks, shoving off the armchair and moving toward him. He minimizes the N/A folder quickly, his eyes still scanning the email, scrolling to the bottom to get to the first in a chain of replies.

"I was emailing with our victim," Castle murmurs, staring at the screen.

She sinks slowly down on the couch next to him, her hip brushing a line of fire along his thigh, her eyes already locked on the screen. "_Dear Mr. Castle," _she murmurs. _"I'm writing to ask you for your help."_

"I was clearly great at that," Castle huffs.

"Be quiet," Beckett says. "_I'm going to keep this brief. I started reading the Storm novels when I was fourteen years old, and it was them that made me realize that I wanted to spend my life in search of justice, in the pursuit of the truth._

_I've discovered some information that must be brought to light. I sat on it for days, unsure of a course of action, but I realized, finally, that there was no better way to do it than through you._

_I know you usually write fiction. But I've seen the several factual articles you've written, and you have the access to the media that I lack. I know this seems impossible – but I feel like I know you, or at least a part of you, through your novels. And I know you're interested in justice, too. So – I trust you._

_Please write back._"

"Well," Castle says after a long moment of silence. "Shit."

"I'm assuming this didn't happen in your universe," Beckett says.

"Emails go through my ex-wife."

She blinks at him.

"Ex-wife, current publisher," he explains into the face of her blank stare. "You know what, that's potentially not what we should be focusing on right now." He scrolls back up, both of them silently scanning the chain of replies, the volley of too-vague emails back and forth that discuss a potential meeting and her help from a man named Jeff.

"Yost," Beckett had murmured quietly to herself. "She wasn't having an affair with him at all. He was helping her with –" she trails off.

"With _what_," Castle growls, feeling the anger snarling in his throat. "This is _useless._ There's no name here. There's _no _solid information."

He can feel the heat of her gaze on him, the careful way she's watching him. "It's not useless at all," she says. "We know now that Cullen was onto some sort of corruption that she didn't want to call the papers about. We know that Yost was helping her."

"And as we got closer to untangling their relationship and discovering more about Elizabeth's life, whoever she had the intel on decided it was necessary to set a bomb and kill us."

"We don't know that her killer and the man she was investigating are the same person. Or that he's the one who set the bomb," Beckett gently reminds him.

"Then who the hell is it?" Castle snaps.

She stills, responding with nothing but a long and reproachful silence.

"Sorry," he finally grits out, reaching up to pinch the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger. "It's just – sorry."

The light brush of her fingers over his forearm helps him drag in a deep breath. "It's not your fault, you know," she whispers, her voice low and steady._  
_

"Right," he sighs, but he feels the weight of it pressing at him. Not just Cullen's death, but his own blindness, and the pained and tired lines of the other Beckett's body.

"It's a good lead," she says, her fingers still dancing lightly, unconsciously over his arm, her torso still canted towards his, her body radiating a quiet kind of understanding.

He suddenly can't take it. Can't take the compassion from a Beckett who doesn't really _mean_ it. Can't take the failure, the thought of everything that's gone wrong the past few days that he's failed to prevent. He shoves the laptop onto the couch, stands abruptly, dislodging her fingers, and stalks toward the kitchen.

He feels the dog's cold nose nudging at his calf, but he ignores it, stepping up to the counter, resting his palms flat against the cool granite and staring blankly at the solid redwood of the cabinets.

And so he sees it – the faint light of far-away headlights refracting from the front windows, the light that abruptly shuts off.

It could be a neighbor.

It could be a trick of his imagination.

A chill trickles down his spine, a dangerous awareness clenching low in his stomach. He whirls, strides to the window, and sees, down on the street, the shadow of a dark sedan. Headlights out. Slowly turning up the driveway.

"Beckett," he calls, whirling around. Her head jerks up, her gaze meeting his as she pushes to her feet. "Back door. Now." There's a copse of trees that he's not totally satisfied with at the edge of the yard, but like hell he's hiding with her in some random closet and waiting for whatever sociopath is creeping slowly towards his house.

"What is it?" she asks, her voice quick and low as she strides after him.

"Dark sedan, no headlights, heading up the driveway."

She jerks to a stop at the glass door, her hand pushing up her jacket, her fingers brushing over her holster.

"No," he grits out.

"You're overreacting. Head upstairs. We'll see who gets out."

"And if it's four guys with AK-47s and we're stuck waiting for them to shoot us full of holes?"

She blows out a breath, muttering something about _histrionic over-imaginative writers _as he pulls the door open. "Gus! Come on," she calls in a quiet rush. The clip of her words betrays what the unwavering purpose in her eyes never will.

Castle can't help but freeze for a beat, his hand poised on the handle and the door half open as he stares at her.

"He could have barked," she whispers, her eyes meeting his, defying him to comment.

"'Course," Castle says, barely managing to keep his a straight face as he ushers her and the dog through the door, closing it tightly behind them. "Head for those trees?"

"Why not?" One hand is clutching her gun, but she reaches over with the other and wraps her fingers firmly around his elbow. "Other side," she says, jerking her head around the pool. "The light from the house will catch us otherwise."

They jog purposefully through the darkness, just the quiet sound of their breathing and the dog panting steadily at her side, both of their rhythms disrupted again and again as they throw glances back at the glowing house.

He breathes a sigh of relief when they reach the first massive oak with still no sign behind them. She's immediately yanking out her phone, tapping in the number to the 12th, but he reaches out, brushes his fingers over her the chilled skin of her thumb before she can hit send. "Call Esposito's cell phone?"

She stares up at him. Their sudden closeness catches in his chest, his breath stuttering at the mix of incredulity and something darker and more desperate swirling in the blackness of her pupils.

"In case someone's listening in at the 12th. Humor me. Just this once," he coaxes. "Just until we figure out what's going on." She keeps staring. "Just this once more," he amends.

"Once more," she says, her voice lacking any kind of acidity.

He tries to convince himself that he's not imagining her slight hesitation before she nudges his fingers away so she can call Esposito.

But then she's snapping quietly into the phone, that moment of soft and dark quiet entirely gone from her eyes and voice. "Esposito, I don't have time to talk. We're outside Castle's house in Greenwich and we just had some unexpected company." She pauses for a moment, and he can hear, through the receiver, something about _local police._

_No_, he mouths, shaking his head dramatically and waving his arms. Gus bumps against his leg reproachfully.

She sighs. "No, don't send anyone out here yet," she grits out. "I've got my gun. Just wanted to keep you aware."

He can hear Espo shouting through the line as she hangs up and silences the phone. "Thanks," he says.

"I have no idea what the hell you're thinking, Castle."

"Just – not sure who we should be trusting," he says, can't miss the slight ripple of her body at the word _we._

"Well, after that call Esposito and Ryan'll be heading up here with their sirens blaring, so the worst that'll happen is we sit tight for a while."

"Yeah," he murmurs, distracted. The quality of darkness is changing – the softness of the night becoming even more muffled, that faint tug at his sternum pulling more insistently even as he struggles against it.

"Don't you dare," she growls, her hand a vice around his wrist as she drags him further into the cluster of trees.

He catches his toe on the ground, stumbles drunkenly, listing into her side. "Sorry," he slurs.

"Stay. Awake." Her words are clipped and harsh, her nails digging firmly into his skin, hard enough to draw blood.

He bites the inside of his cheek ferociously, clenches his hands into fists, but the drag is relentless, terrifying, oppressive. "Don't - let him," he starts, but his voice is slipping inexorably away. His heart thrashes a panicked tattoo against his sternum, but even that won't drag the world back into focus.

"_Castle_," she whispers, her voice laced with anxiety and a breathless overtone that's so close to pleading. He would give anything, do anything, be anything not to leave her alone right now, but the inescapable blackness closes in relentlessly until all he is aware of is the faintest impression of her words.

And then nothing.

* * *

He fights to find her in the darkness, chanting her name, knowing that they are being hunted and that he should be silent and utterly unable to care, not when she could be anywhere and he is failing her, failing her again.

And then her voice filters through the ringing in his ears. "I'm here, Castle I'm here, please stop, _Rick_, it's okay, it's _okay_."

"Kate," he rasps, going still. Realizes that he _had _to still – that he was thrashing on the couch, literally fighting his way back up from consciousness. Her hand is pushing into his thigh, exerting enough pressure that it's got to be hurting her.

"You with me?" she breathes, her voice cracking.

"I'm here," he whispers, feeling himself falling firmly into this world, feeling the fight against it slowly drain away.

"Bad dr –" she starts, but she abruptly cuts herself off.

Their last conversation comes back to him in jagged pieces. His tripping, inadequate explanation of the case. Of their relationship. Of his life in that other world. Her quiet recognition that was somehow less than an acceptance of his experience, the light brush of her fingers over his leg, soothing him, after he was done talking, into a quiet unconsciousness.

And now her question, the way she cuts off the word dream as though she doesn't want to upset him but as though it's the only thing she can accept, as though, even after his inexplicable story about her life, there exists an insurmountable wall that she cannot scale to believe him.

"I was –" he starts, but a flutter of terror brushes against him, a need to get back to the other version of Beckett that is so strong that it steals his breath for a heartbeat. He struggles up into a sitting position, lets her wrap her fingers around his elbow and help him.

"You're okay," she murmurs, her body leaning into his once he's upright, her lips brushing against his temple.

There's nothing he can do right now, no way to possibly influence that other Beckett's fate. "Yeah," he finally sighs. "Bad dream."

"M'sorry," she murmurs. He can't even begin to untangle what she's apologizing for.

"I gotta call Gina soon," he says, the realization fizzling through him, pushing the words out of his mouth.

"Gina?" Beckett asks, her voice soaked in confusion.

"Yeah. What time is it? I could leave her a message. I need to…" he starts, trying to thread his thoughts together. He needs to know if Elizabeth Cullen ever sent the same message in this world, but she wouldn't have sent any names, wouldn't lead them to a possible killer. It's a lead, it's a lead they need to follow as soon as he straightens himself out, but he still feels adrift, fighting through the darkness to get a firm grip on this world.

"Did you talk to Gina when you were -" she starts, cuts off the word that he knows would have been 'sleeping' with a frustrated growl.

"There was an email," he starts, but the words sound too ridiculous to say into the unanchored dark. "I need to check on an email," he amends.

He hears Beckett's sigh, hears the confusion and distress in her slow exhalation. "I talked to Gates while you were sleeping. She said Lapinski's still in lock up. The psychologist's visited him several times, but he hasn't reached any definitive conclusions."

"He wasn't having a mental break, Beckett. You know he wasn't."

"Maybe," she murmurs, and he can hear it in her voice, how she's backing off the edge of believing even that.

"Beckett," he growls.

"Regardless. We need to decide how to handle – everything. We can't just stay here and hope. You – we – need help."

"What I need is to not get attacked again. What I need is to know that you're safe." _In every world_.

"Okay," she says, her voice calm and steady and too reasonable. "And what I need is to know that you're getting proper medical treatment. To know that we're developing a plan if your condition seems like it might persist past the short-term."

"You mean if I stay blind forever," Castle rasps.

"Yes," she says, flatly, and then sits in silence, letting them both digest that.

Her matter-of-fact monosyllable sticks in a way that nothing else has. The thought has been so easy to avoid, with everything in his life a constant shift, with the flux and sway of the two worlds and the vibrant colors of that other universe. Of course he's spent time wishing he could see the twist of Beckett's smile, the distinct tenor of her gaze, the setting sun spilling shadows along her temple. But he hasn't thought about never looking at the heartbreaking lines of her lips again. About never again watching the glow of the New York City skyline in twilight. About never seeing the squinted eyes and squalling red faces of his grandchildren as he holds them for the first time.

"Not that –" she starts.

"Well don't take it back _now_, Beckett," he says with a smile that he know is utterly strained.

"There are ways," she says. "Private security. People we trust. We both need medical attention and we both need to figure out a way to move the case forward, and we can't do that if we keep _running_."

He stands up abruptly, shoving off the couch and away from her. Fumbles over toward where he thinks the kitchen might be. He can hear the utter silence of the house, knows that she knows enough to give him this moment to stumble forward alone, to let him work through the darkness on his own.

His fingers hit the smooth plaster of the wall – near the foyer, maybe, not so far from the front door – and he stands there with his back facing her and gives himself a moment just to _breathe. _"You're right," he finally gets out. He's been so consumed, so caught up in his falling back and forth. But this – this is his world – this is his life.

He only hopes he can remember that.

"If we –" she starts.

But a deafening crack cuts off her words. A bullet? A grenade? Loud enough that his ears echo with it even after the noise has ended.

And then he can hear the rush of the door swinging open, the heavy thud of a footfall into the foyer, the race and then abrupt halt of her steps behind him.

"You," Beckett breathes, a rasp of betrayal coming from maybe ten feet over his left shoulder. He hears the sharp snap of the safety clicking off of the gun he didn't know she still had on her.

"Me," a voice replies, an amiable male baritone that Castle doesn't recognize. It's coming from right next to him.

"Stay away from him," Beckett growls.

"Detective, Detective. Are you really making demands right now?"

"Hurt him and I'll kill you," she grits out, her voice determined but still an unmistakable thread of panic underneath it, and, far below that, a bone-deep kind of exhaustion.

Castle doesn't need to see to know what a disadvantage they have.

"You shouldn't make threats you can't back up," the voice says.

Castle barely registers the starburst of pain at his temple before he's rushing, rushing back toward the starlight.


	16. Chapter 16

When he opens his eyes he's braced for a pain that never comes.

For a heartbeat he can't orient himself. There's the faint twinkling of stars beyond the branches that loom above him. The scratch of bark at his neck and shoulders, the give of grass and dirt beneath his legs, a rigid rope of root underneath his arm. The whisper of leaves, the quiet shuffle of breeze.

And then her voice, slicing through his awareness, coming from beside and above him. "Come any closer and I'll shoot you both," she says, her voice cool and deadly in the darkness of the night.

_You both._

Fuck.

He tilts his head to the right, stares up at the straight lines of her stance, a low vibration trembling through her body. It's anger, he thinks, judging from the clench of her knuckles around her Sig, the poised and deadly tension thrumming through her muscles. The dog is huddled against her right calf, silent and vibrating right along with her.

She's so close to him, a breath away, but he wishes she'd lean in even more, get the knuckles of her gun hand more solidly behind the tree. He reaches around Gus to tap her ankle, let her know he's with her, feels a ripple of acknowledgement run through her as she uses her leg to nudge the dog back, pushing her ankle firmly in front of him.

He slumps there dumbly for a second before he finally realizes. Her spare weapon.

"Are you sure you should be making threats when you're at such a disadvantage?" a male voice asks. Not Lapinksi. That same amiable voice from the other world.

He tries to lean around the tree but she kicks at him, shoving her ankle more insistently against his ribs.

Right. He fumbles his fingers underneath her pants, brushing along the warm skin of her calf, can't help the way his heart trips up against his sternum at the feel of this version of her that he's barely ever touched.

"Tell me why," she says, her voice crackling with the exact same betrayal that he's just heard from his Beckett, a betrayal that carves insistently into his chest and flays him open to the night air.

He wraps his fingers around the cool metal of the Sig in her ankle holster. Her quad ripples in acknowledgement as he carefully draws the gun. He strokes his finger along her shin, asking a kind of question that she can't possibly understand but that she somehow does anyway.

"You're the Chief of Detectives, McQuinn. What the hell did Cullen catch you doing that was bad enough that you _killed _her for it?"

"If you're looking for a confession, Detective, you're barking up the wrong tree. I've been in the force for as long as you've been alive."

"And the bomb?" she presses.

This time it's Lapinski's voice that sounds, a laugh in that guttural rasp that's been seared onto Castle's brain. "Look at you now, Beckett. You don't know _when _to quit. And then you pair up with that writer who we _know _Cullen has been emailing, and you make the connection to Jeff Yost, and what other choice was there?"

Castle opens his mouth to say something like _How about not exploding one of your_ _detective's cars_, but he barely makes a noise before the air leaves his lungs in an abrupt rush. She's kicked him in the sternum, he realizes as he pushes indignantly at the boot that still hovers near his chest, gasping silently, feeling incurably offended and then suddenly comprehending.

They don't know he's with her.

He decides to roll with the advantage, leaning just to the other side of the tree, squinting through the shadows to get the visual that is impossible for her.

Lapinski's been holding steady as he's talked, but the Chief of Detectives has been stalking silently to the right, noiselessly moving through the darkness to walk a wide circle around the tree.

In a step –

In a step he'll have a decent shot at her.

"Beckett," Castle growls, but it's too late, he's too late, Beckett is turning to look down at him and she can't see McQuinn, fucking McQuinn who is lifting his gun and Castle is too goddamn late.

There's the tiniest fraction of a heartbeat when he considers it. When he considers his mother and Alexis, Alexis just working through her first year of college, losing her only parent at the same age that Kate did, when he considers the poor damn dog that's even now staring up at him so adoringly.

And Beckett.

Both of them. The one who beams at him every morning when he hands her a cup of coffee and the one who goes to sleep every night staring at the wall of her mother's murder.

But the Chief of Detectives is lifting a gun to kill her and none of the rest of it – none of it - matters.

He flings himself to his feet and into her body, shooting as he goes, blindly firing in McQuinn's direction and then toward Lapinski, squeezing the trigger even as he falls onto her in a tangle that's less graceful than he expected because his leg muscles are refusing to listen.

_Fuck, fuck, what the fuck_, she is saying in the next heartbeat, shoving herself out from underneath him and launching to her feet. He doesn't hear any return fire, doesn't hear anything but her string of curses and the dog whining softly next to him. Then her hand's hovering at his sternum, brushing over a place he somehow cannot feel, and she's pressing his own hand hard into his chest and gritting out _hang on, please just fucking hang on, I just have to make sure they're dead, okay, just hang the fuck on._

He can hear her snapping into the phone as she walks away, _I need a 'bus here ten minutes ago, man down, gunshot wound to the chest, _and he thinks that maybe the urgency should permeate some part of him even as he somehow knows it never will.

He feels himself drifting pleasantly, staring up at the leaves and the shimmering light of the stars above him, appreciating the nuances of the night, all the different layers of darkness that he hasn't taken the time to notice lately.

And somewhere between the nearby melody of her voice cursing desperately into the phone and the comfort of all the shades of shadow, he realizes -

He remembers.

He remembers the surprise that crackled through him when she walked into his signing at the Strand and flashed her badge at him instead of a book.

He remembers the spark that caught in his chest when she led him back to the interrogation room, the worlds upon worlds of possibilities in the narrow appraisal of her gaze when she looked him up and down.

He remembers the shiver of her words up his spine as she sat down across from him – "Mr. Castle. You don't seem like the type of man to get caught up in all this. A wife and kid in suburban Connecticut. A dependable career as a writer."

"Caught up in all of what?" he'd asked, falling ever deeper into the layers of color in her eyes.

"Allison Tisdale," she'd said, slamming a picture down in front of him. "Daughter of real estate mogul Jonathan Tisdale."

"She's pretty."

"She's dead," Beckett had said, implacable in a way that was too matter-of-fact to be an act.

He'd already been hopelessly bewitched by the gorgeous tension of her jaw, by the purpose vibrating from her every molecule. She'd sucked him even further in when she mentioned making the connection with _Hell Hath No Fury _and he'd realized that despite her icy demeanor, she'd been a fan.

He remembers her dismissal. Remembers walking out of the 12th, ready to call the car service to take him back to Greenwich. Remembers the way his fingers stilled and his knees locked, his muscles refusing to move him forward from just outside the precinct, remembers waiting in the clear skies and then the cold blue twilight and then a nighttime drizzle. Still he'd stood, still he'd stood and waited.

He remembers the way she looked when she emerged, striding purposefully from the building, remembers the sudden hesitation in her step when her gaze hit his, remembers the flush that crept up her neck and her flustered, gorgeous blink.

"I was in your area," he'd said.

"You ever leave my area?"

"It's raining. Figured I could share my car service." The car service he hadn't called yet, but they'd always been quick.

"Make it a point not to share rides with men I've recently pulled in for questioning," she'd said.

"What about an umbrella?" he'd asked with a sheepish grin.

He remembers their bodies bumping together once as they'd walked up Lafayette, remembers the shiver of sensation that rippled through him in a place that was deeper than physical.

He remembers their lips brushing in a slow caress at the top of the subway stairs, the way his torso, his body, his being had tilted toward her, the starburst of brightness that had fizzled though him at the touch. The hesitant flutter of her eyelashes, the dark way she'd stared at him before her chest had hitched and she'd walked down the stairs without another word. He remembers that he'd watched her disappear and realized that all of his plans, all of the machinations he'd so carefully plotted as he'd stood outside the 12th wouldn't work, that he could not shadow this woman.

He remembers, and he knows that in any world, in any universe, he would have made this same decision.

He opens his eyes – he's not sure when he'd closed them – and sees her face through the darkness, hovering right above his, feels the far-away pressure of her hands against his chest. "Just stay the hell _awake _for once," she growls down at him, the raw edge of some vibrant kind of need in her voice.

Her chest is rising and falling with jagged inhales, her fingers trembling against his heart, her body straining to keep him alive.

There's so much in this world that he will never be able to give her.

"Dick Coonan killed your mother," he blurts. Not enough. But something.

The pressure on his chest lifts for a beat as she rocks back, then returns even more forcefully. "What the hell are you talking about?"

"Coonan murdered her, but he was a contract killer."

"No," she says, her voice abrupt, decisive and distracted at once. "I arrested him a couple years back for killing his brother. I would have –" she starts, but her words trail away from her as she stares down at him. Probably at the puddle of blood that's undoubtedly expanding beneath him.

The shadows grow deeper, darker, some of the stars slipping away. He presses on, waiting for the pain that's still refusing to cascade through his body. "Bracken ordered the hit," he breathes. "Senator William Bracken." He hesitates, spinning through pictures tacked up against her bedroom wall, the passenger seat of the cop car that gets no use. But if she can get out ahead of this – if she can beat this one thing. "Montgomery knows. He wants to protect you. He has - a file."

"What are you talking about?" she whispers harshly, but he can see the knowledge knocking into her, making her curl closer, her eyes shining brighter in the darkness, her fingers trembling harder into his chest. He can see her faith that, if nothing else, he wouldn't spend his last moments feeding her a lie.

She's already drowning in it.

He doesn't know if this will be enough to save her.

"You don't let go," he says, frowning at the rasp in his voice. "And you don't back down. And that makes you so extraordinary." He can see her shaking her head, a slow movement back and forth in the darkness. "But you need to be smart. I've seen you – where I'm from - bleeding out in the grass from a bullet in your chest."

"Castle," she exhales, her voice cracking.

"Don't make this for nothing," he gets out. He's lasting for longer than he should, but he can feel his consciousness start to unravel, can feel himself drifting, that slow sink into another reality.

He's leaving Alexis without a father, his mother without a son. He's leaving Beckett with a name and a prayer that she won't unravel into pieces as she chases it.

"Take care of Gus for me," he murmurs.

"Shut up," she grits out, her voice a ferocious growl.

"M'serious. Kid's in college, can't trust my mom with a house plant, and a dog with a name that blasé isn't safe on the street."

"You are _not _leaving me with a damn dog and the answer to the most important question of my life," she says.

But it's heavier, now, that same drag he's never been able to fight, that same exhaustion curling in his blood, twining around his limbs and dragging him down, ever deeper down. "I don't think you've even started to ask the most important questions yet," he manages, fighting to reach toward her, but it's too much; gravity is a constant and sucking pull that won't release.

She grabs his hand with a strength that he thinks, in some far away part of his brain, should be cracking his bones. But all he can do is twitch his thumb, stroke his finger along the back of her hand.

_I love you, _he thinks to her, can't even tell if his mouth is opening to say the words, can't hear whatever she might be saying back in the darkness. The metallic taste in the back of his throat and the sharp scent of blood fade away. The distant murmur of her voice follows, drifting into the dark, and then slowly the steady pressure of her hand on his chest and the vice her fingers clasped around his. And finally it all recedes - the dwindling starlight on the pale lines of her cheeks, her too-bright eyes asking him for promises that he won't be able to keep.

It's different this time. Less a dark and inexorable drag. More like falling slowly, softly into sleep.


	17. Chapter 17

The darkness is agony.

His pulse kicks sluggishly, erratically through his body, every squeeze of his heart a burning struggle, his blood rushing in fitful starts of fire through his veins. For a moment he is aware of only the crashing cacophony of pain, the illusive taste of blood in the back of his throat, the layers of darkness that he wishes would drag him back down into a place where he could find some peace.

But his heart thrashes harder and harder against his ribcage, his lungs keep sucking in air, and gradually, breath by breath, the pain in his chest subsides to a hollow kind of ache, shifts slowly to a crackling burn at his temple that is so much more survivable.

He opens his eyes to the light.

He opens his eyes to a light so vivid that it punches the breath right back out of him, sets his heart stumbling out of its newly-found rhythm. There's the stark white plane of a ceiling above him – not darkness and trees and slowly-fading stars, not the shadows of her face as she pleads with him to stay.

But he can hear her. He can hear her still. "You must know you're not going to get away with this. My team knows where I am. They'll be here soon."

"Detective Beckett, I know you're not trying to talk me down. I've been in the force for as long as you've been alive." The man's voice – McQuinn, he reminds himself, the damn NYPD Chief of Detectives is a murderer in every universe - is calm and certain.

He squints through the brightness, carefully tilts his head toward the voices to make some sense out of this world, but for a brilliant and blinding moment he can see nothing but her: the woman who lights up with a slow-burning smile when he makes a stupid joke, who strokes softly over his skin with the same graceful fingers that have taken down murderers, who wakes him with the slow slide of her body over his, the tumble of her hair shielding his eyes from the morning light.

And then reality of this universe comes rushing back, washes over him anew: the panicked, pale lines of her face, the heavy bulk of a cast over her arm, the metallic glint of cuffs joining her hands in front of her.

The Chief of Detectives behind her. The barrel of his gun pressed firmly against the top of her spine.

"Out the back door," McQuinn orders her, pushing his Sig into her so that she stumbles forward.

Castle shuts his eyes so that only the slightest sliver of light remains, forces his muscles to stay slack as he feigns unconsciousness. He mentally fumbles through the facts of the house and the case and everything – _anything _– but he can't come up with any kind of plan that will give them an edge.

He hears the soft scuff of a dragging toe, then a trip and thump as they go by him, an offbeat stagger that he prays is Beckett playing up her weakness. "What about him?" she asks in an low growl.

"What do you think, Beckett?" McQuinn volleys back, their voices moving closer to the door.

"He's _blind_," she grits out. "Because of _your_ bomb."

He chances opening his eyes a little wider, tilting his head to glance around the room, his blood singing in his veins. He's frenetic, his brain churning so quickly that he almost misses it, the black glint next to the blue microfiber couch that should be a leather cream. The sleek lines of her gun, maybe ten feet away from him.

"Those are the breaks, Beckett. Sometimes you get caught in the crossfire. You should understand that better than anyone."

An icy chill trickles down the back of Castle's neck. "What do you mean?" she whispers. Castle takes the risk, raises his head slightly. The two of them are almost at the door. He glances over at the gun, at their backs, tries to calculate how quickly he can move with the pain and adrenaline both thumping through his body.

"What do you think his daughter will do when a cop knocks on her door and tells her that –"

McQuinn's words cut off in an abrupt sputter as her foot comes down on his instep, her body ducking below his gun and her shoulder ramming back into his chest. Castle flings himself toward the couch, wraps his fingers around the cold steel of her Sig as McQuinn steadies himself and adjusts his finger on the trigger, leveling the barrel of the weapon at her chest.

Castle wouldn't have hesitated, he knows he wouldn't have, but the sight of that gun coming up at her makes him move faster than he'd have ever thought possible. Still on the ground, he swings his gun around, squeezing the trigger and feeling the recoil jolt through his arms. McQuinn slumps bonelessly to the floor as Beckett staggers a step away.

For several heartbeats Castle sits in suspension, waiting for his body to quit on him, waiting for that final, inexorable drag toward darkness.

But not here.

"Castle?" Beckett calls, her gaze flicking over to him even as she drops to her knees and presses her fingers against McQuinn's pulse point.

"M'okay," he responds. She crouches there for a long minute before she finally stands. Castle realizes he's just been sitting there, curled uselessly on the floor, the gun still clutched in his hands.

"How did you –" she starts as she strides over to him, her steps hurried, the lines of her face drawn and pinched by pain, but she cuts herself off abruptly. "You can see," she says in a breathless rush, and he realizes that she must have noticed his gaze tracking her. "Castle, you can see."

"Yeah," he murmurs.

She drops to her knees in front of him, her hands coming up to his shoulders, flitting over his neck, her forehead crashing into his. "Castle. You can _see,_" she whispers vehemently.

"Yeah," he says again, and this time it's less because he's in shock and more because the realization is crashing through him, a wave so strong it drowns his breath and burns his eyes and throat. Somewhere mixed into that upsurge of gratefulness is a sense of loss, a crackling heartbreak for the Beckett he left crouching alone in a field with three dead bodies and a dog, for the dark and haunted look in her eyes that he will have never done enough to fix.

"It's okay," she's saying, her hand smoothing over his hair and her body burrowing closer to his. He doesn't want to know what he's doing to make her say that. "Everything's going to be okay now."

* * *

Hours later he's sitting on the pale blue sofa, the body gone and CSI doing a final sweep. Beckett's hovering next to the door, murmuring something to a uniform with a notepad and pen, but she wraps it up, catches Castle's glance and smiles, drifting back over to him.

Ryan and Esposito walk down the stairs, skirting a group of detectives and flinging themselves into the two chairs opposite the couch before Castle can even think to stand. Beckett drops down beside him, an inch too close to be entirely professional and several inches further than where he'd like her.

"I still have no idea what I'm going to tell Janette," Ryan says morosely, staring at the two of them. "I was really just hoping you'd get some sleep and feed Immanuel Cat."

"We found him, by the way," Esposito says, glaring at Ryan. "Cowering in the closet in the second master bedroom."

"Look, having to tell someone that the Chief of Detectives was shot and killed in her house is bad enough. I wasn't about to tell her that I also lost her cat."

Beckett lifts a hand, pinches the bridge of her nose, clearly several steps from being ready to hear about the cat. "Phelps seems to think there's a lot of clean up to be done."

Esposito makes a small noise of assent. "While we were on Operation Feline Recon I was on the phone with Gates again. Those emails you had us pull from Gina make it clear that Cullen was onto McQuinn and whatever he was doing with those bank accounts. She'd pulled Yost into it – we still don't know where he is, but they've got people down there looking for him or his body."

"And Lapinksi?"

"Gates has him back to the 12th until we can get some more of this mess sorted out. It's looking more and more like people from the 17th were involved in this in varying degrees."

"Yeah," Beckett sighs.

"We're still not entirely sure why McQuinn set that bomb," Ryan offers after a beat.

"Because he knew we wouldn't stop. He knew we wouldn't stop and he wanted to get it back to the 17th's hands, where he had people he could more easily control." Castle's voice is rough, rasping, his head pulsing from the light and that profound ache still swirling somewhere deep within his chest.

"Oh," Esposito says into the silence of a too-long pause.

"Regardless," Beckett murmurs.

"We'll be waiting outside. You guys are with us," Esposito says. He and Ryan stand and walk away, and then Castle and Beckett are left sitting on the couch in silence. Finally, she stands, starts to stray slowly after her team, throwing a questioning glance back at Castle when he doesn't follow. He pushes off the couch, straightens, but he finds himself being pulled inexorably toward the back door.

The majority of the guys from CSI have moved on, but he still needs to skirt two uniforms. "Here," one of them says, passing him a latex glove, and he grips it in his palm to slide the glass door open before he steps out into the dark and cool night air, stares across the pool at the expanse of yard, at the copse of trees in the distance.

He's gained his sight, but snatches of the memories that aren't his still flutter against his consciousness – twelve-year-old Alexis dragging him through he Sydney zoo, that ephemeral kiss he shared with Beckett at the subway station, a dark night after Meredith went to sleep spent hunched over his computer, feverishly typing a story that he knew would never be published.

He's gained his sight, and he can't help but think that it might not have been worth it.

He feels her presence draw up beside him, her soft sigh of air, the faintest brush of her knuckles along the back of his hand. "What do you think he meant?" Beckett asks after a long silence. "When he said that sometimes people get caught in the crossfire and then made that reference to –" she abruptly cuts herself off.

"Alexis," Castle supplies, his voice bumping unevenly over the name.

"You think there's a connection?" she roughs out.

"A connection," he says, then finally catches up with her. "To Bracken?"

She nods, staring out across the darkness.

"No," he says, studying her closely, that particular disbelieving clench of her jaw. "Your mother's murder isn't that much of a secret, Beckett. Especially to the Chief of Detectives, who would have looked into you the second you caught this case."

"Right," she says quietly.

He rummages for a joke, for anything to make her smile, but he feels wrung out, exhausted, utterly incapable.

"What happened?" she finally asks.

"You were there," Castle says.

"No. I wasn't."

He lets his gaze bump briefly along the tense lines of her torso before he turns back to the distant trees. "It doesn't matter anymore."

"What does that mean?"

He sighs, stares absently across the lawn, tries to dredge up the story that refuses to coalesce. Or that he doesn't want to coalesce, doesn't want to put words to the look on her face as she slowly watched the life drain out of him, doesn't want to capture the finality of that absolute sense of loss in the starlight.

"I died," he finally says, feeling her body jerk around, orienting toward him with a lurch.

"That's not funny, Castle," she says, her voice raw.

"It really wasn't funny at all," he agrees. He gestures halfheartedly at the trees when she remains quiet. "It was McQuinn there, too. I died. I woke up. I could see."

She reaches up, runs her hand over her forehead. He finally turns to look at her. Her eyes glint with anger or sorrow in the starlight; her body thrums with a passionate kind of disbelief. He knows that she's not the kind of person who can make that leap, and he can accept that. Last year she'd made the one leap that he'd needed from her, and she'd done it with a fervent and reckless abandon that was so much more than he'd ever hoped for. "There's a medical explanation," she starts, but her words die out, as though even she can tell they're too little for the soft and quiet gravity of the night sky.

"I'm sure there is," Castle agrees readily, tilting his chin up at the stars. He doesn't need her to understand this story. He doesn't need anything from her other than to be here with him.

"What do we do now?" she finally murmurs.

His gaze jerks back to her, wondering if she's hiding some secret injury, because she doesn't _ask _questions like that. But he only sees a flickering, hesitant reverence in her eyes: she might not believe it entirely, but she respects it, respects his connection to the house and the case and the reemergence of his sight, respects the worlds through which he's traveled to get here.

He glances once more at the yard, realizes he's been hoping for a golden retriever to bound toward him, realizes he's been waiting for a piece of a universe that will never come back to him. "We go home," he says, taking her hand.

She breathes deeply, clutching his fingers, and together they walk away.


	18. Chapter 18

Sometimes he wakes with the tendrils of dreams still curling around him and a yearning that carves an ache deep beneath his ribcage. They're never that sharp and vivid sense of reality, never more than swirling impressions that shift and change when he tries to cling too tightly to them.

The first time it's a misty day and she's dressed in black running capris, a dark tank top. Her arms are wrapped around her stomach. She's shivering. One hand has Gus's leash wrapped around it, her fingers closed in a tense, white-knuckled grip. She's walking over the grass toward, he realizes suddenly, a backhoe, a backhoe that's steadily digging a neat hole near the center of a cemetery. She stands back against a tree a dozen yards away and stares at the ceaselessly expanding pile of earth.

The dog presses at her leg, his body pushing into her calves, but she stays utterly still, even when the backhoe pauses and a worker hops down to the grass, walks purposefully over to her.

"You okay?" the man asks, his voice gruff.

"Fine," she says. He can't quite get to the tenor of her voice, can't quite tell if it's underpinned with a trembling kind of yearning or if there's the same steady steel as always in that monosyllable.

"Cemetery closes at dusk."

The sky's darkening, the mist turning into a soft and bleak kind of rain, but she says nothing, only fishes her badge out from a sleek pocket at the back of her shirt, holds it aloft for the worker's inspection.

"Alright, then," the man says, not unkindly. "You just let me know if you need anything."

She nods once, then stands at attention, watching the machine work as around her the shadows of the world bleed slowly into darkness.

* * *

He opens his eyes to a startlingly bright light, rolls awkwardly over to see Beckett drawing up the curtains.

"Up, up," she's saying, already striding toward the bed, looking like she's seconds from resorting to bodily force. "I don't know why you closed those things when you knew it would be such a nice day outside."

"Time'sit," he mutters, blinking rapidly to adjust to the sun-soaked room. Yesterday morning, the light had filtered into his consciousness before he was fully awake, and when he'd opened his eyes he'd thought, for a heartbeat, that he was in a different world. He didn't ever again want that same plummeting sense of vertigo, that same horrible drop in his stomach at the feeling of grasping toward something so different than reality.

"Seven thirty," she says, sitting beside him on the bed with a quick efficiency that bodes nothing positive.

He'd roll back over if the sight of her face weren't so captivating, almost more so because of the pallor that still clings to the ridges of her cheekbones, the deep exhaustion in the darkness of her eyes, the bandage that still covers the wound at her temple from when Lapinski plowed her down. "This is inhuman," he says instead, yawning and circling her good wrist with soothing fingers. "Come back to sleep."

She pulls from his grasp, yanking the covers down and callously ignoring his pained moan. "Day starts now," she says firmly.

He finally registers that she has on a pair of running shoes and dark capris (navy, not black, they're just a deep shade of navy). "You can't run," he blurts, reaching back to her and curling his thumb around her pinky.

He'd thought, after they'd driven home from Greenwich and both gotten a thorough once-over at Presbyterian, that she'd be relieved at the time to finally stop running, to finally stop worrying, to finally go home and collapse into bed with him. Instead, she'd driven them straight to the 12th, tried to send him to the loft alone when he suggested that maybe that wasn't where they should be ("Hell no, Kate Beckett," he'd replied, "What if I go blind again?"). She'd promptly launched into a detailed investigation of Lapinski's phone records and potential leads on other conspirators with a reluctant Ryan and Esposito until Gates had kicked her out and threatened her with suspension if she showed up within the next two weeks.

Clearly, resting is not the name of the game that Beckett is interested in playing right now.

"Just a brisk walk," she says.

He stares at her casted arm, the arm he now knows she almost lost when that bomb exploded.

"Or you can stay here," she allows.

He wants nothing more than to draw the curtains, to spend the day curled in bed, but if she wants to move so badly then like hell he won't keep moving with her. "I'm with you," he says.

* * *

In sleep he drifts back to what he instantly recognizes as the same place, even though the sun is shining cheerfully and her outfit has shifted to a demure black dress, the neckline covering her collarbones and the hem brushing the bottom of her knees. She stands silent and alone at the back of a large crowd, her eyes tracking the solid mahogany coffin that's being slowly and inexorably lowered into the ground.

He has no sense of time and only the vaguest sense of other people, that shifting and murmuring mass that collectively fixates on the slowly-filling scar in the earth, but he finds himself vibrantly, vitally aware of her, the taught lines of her body, the restless and haunted flutter of her fingers, the guilt that soaks through the darkness of her eyes.

He thinks maybe he should be distressed that it's his body being buried under an inexorable stream of dirt.

Eventually a hunched figure approaches her - his daughter, one arm wrapped around her stomach, a hand pressed over her mouth. His mother and Meredith hover a respectable distance away, their shoulders knocking, tears streaming down both their faces.

Beckett's eyes close briefly and then flare open, a well of determination in them in place of that desolate and guilt-filled void of her pupils. She strides forward, ducks slightly down, grasps Alexis' trembling hands in her own. She murmurs something in the girl's ear, something that has her uncurling slightly, her hands steadying. Meredith and his mother drift closer, and Beckett straightens, gives them a sad and familiar smile.

Of course she would have been the one to tell them.

"I'm glad to meet you, dear," his mother says, drawing Beckett into an embrace that she stiffly tolerates.

"I'm so sorry," Beckett replies, her voice clear and sharp with the weight of so much undeserved responsibility.

His daughter must hear it, even through her grief. "Come home with us after the reception," she says.

Meredith glances between the two but stays silent.

"Yes, please do," Martha murmurs, reaching out to hold the detective's elbow.

"I can't," she says, her voice now raw and throaty. "I really can't."

Castle's understanding vibrates through his ribcage. She can't, and not just for the obvious reasons: that this is the time for their family and only their family to go home together. She can't because she can't for reasons inscribed deep within her: that whatever grief she's feeling she cannot handle with other people, that she wraps herself in insular walls and carries that ever-deepening well of hurt around with her instead of letting it flow away.

He needs, more than anything in any world, to be there for her.

"Gus's things," Alexis blurts suddenly, her voice strained through her tears. "You need to come get his bed. He hasn't been sleeping right, I bet."

"Darling, I don't think anyone or anything who was attached to your father has been sleeping right," Martha says.

"No," Meredith says, the first words she's spoken. "She's right. Castle bought the damn dog a thousand-dollar memory foam orthopedic bed when it started getting arthritis in its knees."

Beckett's still slowly shaking her head, but Alexis reaches out and grabs her hand and slowly leads her forward, toward the sea of sedate black town cars, away from the freshly-wounded earth.

* * *

He catches her curled on the couch in the two am darkness, the eerie glow from the television flickering over her body.

He starts to speak, stops himself when he hears a woman's low voice drift from the speakers - _The police are continuing their investigations into the allegations of misconduct, extortion, and racketeering. Without a doubt, the reputation of the NYPD is irretrievably tarnished for years to come. For more_ –

The voice cuts off abruptly - the screen still flickers, but she's turned off the sound. Her face turns to him, the wavering blue light making the sharp lines of her cheekbones even more pronounced. "Sorry," she murmurs. "I wake you?"

"No," he says, his feet sticking for an instant before he makes himself walk toward the couch, sink onto the sofa a careful foot away from her.

"Couldn't sleep," she says, sounding so distant, drawing her knees up to her chest and wrapping her good arm around them. "Figured I'd watch some tv."

"Evening news seems especially pertinent." He doesn't mention the phone calls they've gotten from the media, the countless reports they've both had to give to the various investigating agencies, the steady appearance of their names in news article after article.

"It was on," she says.

He settles back into the cushions, not bothering to dignify that with a response, and waits. And waits. She runs her thumb along the edge of her kneecap, tracing the sharp ridge of her patella, over and over, over and over, a rhythmic, self-soothing kind of motion.

"I'm not sure why I do it anymore," she says.

He opens his mouth, starts on a response that she cuts off before he even has a chance.

"And before you say it, I'm not sure I want to hear the word justice right now. Not after -" she starts, waving her hand in an encompassing kind of motion at the television. "Thinking that I've been associated with - with everything." Her voice is unwavering, but her eyes still glint with that betrayal.

He's not sure what to say, other than that the one thing he could count on when he washed up in different world with a new house and an old wife was Beckett's dependable presence at the twelfth, and, even more than that, her commitment to justice, her unwavering and unrelenting pursuit of the truth. "I think it makes it even more important," he finally says, "that you're there. People like you, and Ryan, and Esposito. People who stare into the face of that corruption and go to work every day in spite of it. Because of it." Knowing that these powerful men who should be protecting her, who should be keeping her safe – a Senator and a Captain and a Chief of Detectives – have betrayed her, and refusing to let that stop her.

"Well. It sucks," she huffs, staring at the picture of McQuinn's face on the screen.

He laughs, the quiet and breathless sound pulled from him. "Look at it this way," he says, not allowing the words to stick in his throat. "We're both still here."

* * *

He sees her in a dimly-lit room. Exposed pipes, stark, faded grey walls, a heavy metal door that looks like it belongs in the basement of the 12th.

She's poised in front of a half-assembled murder board, a small stack of cards and pictures in her hands, a scattered spray of black and white over the stark blankness of the space. Behind her, Montgomery and Esposito and Ryan stand, their faces somber. They're not helping, not looking at their phones, not doing anything other than silently watching her work.

He's so transfixed by her face – the emotionlessness that she's pasted so carefully onto herself that he knows she's skirting the edges of a breakdown – that it takes him too long to realize. It takes him until she carefully places the last picture on the board that he notices, with a start of surprise he never should have felt, that it's a picture of her mother.

It's that same stark black and white starburst of cards and photographs that had hung on the wall opposite her bed in her apartment. That same tangled web of connections with more of the holes filled in - Bracken and Coonan and Montgomery, and already a spray of cards spiralling out from the Senator.

The scene fades too quickly, though he struggles desperately to hold onto it, and he is left with only this essential fact: She took down the cards across from her bed. She took them down, and now she's hanging them, hanging them at the twelfth, with Montgomery and Ryan and Esposito standing behind her.

* * *

"I bought us a fish," Castle tells her when she opens the door for him. Her eyes narrow as she takes in the ten-gallon tank that he's carefully clutching. She peers down, sighs as she catches sight of the cramped container at the bottom, a splash of murky water with a flare of pink and purple.

"Why?" Beckett asks, stepping back, her eyes flicking over him with what he chooses to believe is quiet amusement.

"He's a betta fish," Castle says, ignoring her question. "Amelia said he would be perfectly happy in a smaller tank, but I thought he would enjoy the room to stretch his fins."

"You got us a fish," Beckett says flatly.

"His name is Gus," Castle informs her.

Beckett blinks again. "It's horrifying to think that I'm less surprised that you named the fish and more surprised that you named the fish Gus."

"I know," Castle says, proudly. "I figure if we don't kill him with our odd hours, we can graduate to a frog or a rabbit or a dog."

He has decided that the first step in moving past this other world is not to move past it at all. He wants, sometimes, to fall into dreams that flicker through the life of that other version of Beckett, he wants to drift slowly into a sleep where he can revel in her contradictions and regret all the things that he could never do for her.

His Beckett's not ready to hear about it, yet. He knows this. He knows she's still struggling with everything surrounding the bomb, the raw wound of too much betrayal and too many injustices still fresh and open. But he's resolved that he'll tell her whatever she wants to hear, whenever she wants to hear it.

She pinches the bridge of her nose, stares down at the tiny container.

"Cute fish," she finally says.

* * *

He sees her next walking in the sun, her hand wrapped around Gus's leash, the dog trotting happily beside her. She pauses outside an outdoor café, her face breaking into a tired smile and her arm coming up in a wave. His chest constricts on a too-slow heartbeat. He wants to see her happy - he wants to see her happy more than anything - and he'd shared less than a week with this version of her, but an irrational wave of sadness still washes through him at the sight of her moving on.

Then she walks forward and he sees who she's waving to – his daughter, her red hair up in a bun, one hand clutching a steaming porcelain mug, the lines of her face exhausted and pale but some grim and unwavering determination to survive inscribed into the darkness of her pupils.

"I hope you weren't waiting long," Beckett says as she sits, reaching out and briefly clutching one of Alexis' hands in greeting.

Alexis shakes her head. "Went on a walk, wound up getting here a little faster than I'd thought I would."

The waitress walks up and speaks to them in a loud and cheery voice that cuts right through their muted conversation. Beckett orders a coffee, the waitress leaves, and then both women are sitting there in a fragile, awkward kind of silence.

"Gus looks happy," Alexis finally observes.

Beckett smiles hesitantly. "I've been paying someone to walk him in the middle of the day, and if I do that and make it home by six thirty he seems to get on well enough."

"Good. That's good."

"The offer still stands, though – he's yours whenever you want him," Beckett says quickly.

Alexis shakes her head slowly. "I'll just keep visiting," she says, then jerks her chin up. "As long as that's okay."

"Whenever you feel like it," Beckett says. "My door is always open."

The waitress comes by with the coffee, and Beckett wraps her hands around it, takes a long sip that lulls them both back into silence.

When she's speaks again, it's in a slow and deliberate way that sounds utterly rehearsed. "I know you've said you don't want to hear my apologies –"

"I don't," Alexis says, her voice stumbling over Beckett's – "I really don't."

"But I just – wish I had more to give you. Other than a promise to find everyone even tangentially responsible for what happened to your father."

Alexis nods, a tired motion that shows they've been over this before. "I'm thinking about transferring," the girl finally says. "It felt good, being at Oxford, getting away from my parents – but now just the thought of going back, of being away from all the memories we've shared here – I don't know if I can do it."

Beckett's already shaking her head. "Something like this – it has the power to make you want to rebuild your whole life around it. To let soak into your daily rhythms until you think about it every morning when you wake up and every night when you go to bed, to infiltrate your thoughts so thoroughly that it becomes the most integral piece of your existence."

"How could it not be?" Alexis breathes. "How can this ever not be the most integral piece of my existence?"

Beckett's silent for a long time. "I don't know," she finally says. "I'm still working on figuring that out myself. I'd thought I'd done it, for a while, but it turned out I was just burying it."

"So – what are you saying?"

"Do what you have to do – whatever you have to do – but don't let this become your life. Don't let it drag you down into that darkness."

"You'll – you'll be there?" Alexis asks, sounding suddenly, very much, like a little girl who's lost her father.

Beckett takes a deep and deliberate breath. "Whatever you need. Whenever you need it. I'll always be here for you."

* * *

"How's Gus?" he asks as she steps into the bedroom. He'd gone in with the intention of taking a nap, but he can't quite stop the endless loops of his mind, the refractions of that other place kalediosciping through his vision every time he tries to rest.

He wants answers. That's who he is.

He wants answers that he is never going to get.

"Fine. Recovering quite handily from his post-gluttonous bout of listlessness."

"Overfeeding is the most common cause of betta fish death," Castle says knowledgably.

"You made that up right that second."

He smiles at her, stretches out a hand and flexes his fingers for her to come closer. She steps next to the bed, and he reaches over, draws her slowly down next to him until she's pressed awkwardly against his side, half sitting, half reclined. She's been quicker to acquiesce lately when he asks her to rest, half a heartbeat faster to curl against him after coming home from the doctor or one of her lengthening walks through West Village. "There's some kind of fundamental truth in there somewhere," he says.

"Regardless. Survival seems imminent."

"We keep this up, we'll need to upgrade soon."

She hums, stretching out against him, a loose and warm sleepiness in the laxness of her body. "Let's get through a little more of the immediate future first."

"Deal."

Her gaze roams over him, her eyes already at half-mast but still discerning. "Trouble sleeping?" she finally asks.

"A little," he admits.

She shifts closer, pressing more firmly into him, the angles of her body aligning with the empty spaces left by his. "Do anything for you?"

He opens his mouth to make some sort of snappy, lewd remark, but he glances down at her, the golden lamplight on her messy ponytail, the affectionate smile flitting over the bow of her lips, the sleepy flutter of her eyelashes as she nuzzles closer. "Just -" he swallows around it. "Just stay."

She hums unintelligibly, her fingers drifting in aimless patterns along his collarbone, over his sternum. He watches her as her muscles slowly slacken and her eyes close and her lips part, watches her as she breathes gently against his chest, watches her and ignores the green glow of the clock, the slow advance of time that he can't bring himself to care about.

Finally, he closes his eyes.

He sleeps.


End file.
